Enhanced Double Decoction Mash Fail

[Muss]

Hi All

I brewed KingBrianI's "World's Best Oktoberfest" last weekend after takin a long Hiatus in beermaking (Have been having a go at wine and spirits).
It was also my first Enhanced Double Decotion Mash.

I though everything went really well, I hit all the right times and temperatures... too easy after a long break.

However after reading someones blog about their decoction mashing technigues I've just reaslised I've made quite an error.

When I took the decoction volumes out of the main mash I did it by decanting the liquid out of the tap at the bottom of the mash tun, filtering out the grain.
So I was just boiling liquids and not any grain!

How do you think that will affect the end product?
I suspect the beer won't be as dark and matly since the grain would have missed out on it's caramelisation.

I'm tempted to do it all again and pour over the yeast cake as soon as this batch goes in to secondary, then taste and compare the bottled products during Oktober.

 

[koaps]

Yea man you done gone messed up...

My guess is you won't get as much malty caramel as you should but as long as you left a decent amount of liquid in the mash to do it's job, you probably just did a really long drawn out step mash.

I did the enhanced double decoction the other day for my wheat beer and missed all my times and temps, started my first way too thick and had to add liquid in and all sorts of stuff, but still got a pretty full conversion on my iodine tests and almost nailed my OG, so my guess is you will still make ok beer, just not what it could have been.

Did you happen to do starch conversion test before mashout?

 

[remilard]

The risk is that you have a lot of unconverted starch. The reason you boil thick mash (usually) is that boiling denatures enzymes and the enzymes are in thin mash. The exception is a mashout decoction where you want to denature enzymes.

If you converted then no harm but you didn't really get the advantages of a normal decoction mash as you boiled no grain and very little starch.