Mash schedule from historical recipe

[doug293cz]

Serves me right for typing too quickly. Thanks for chiming in. In fact given enough time, alpha amylase will produce primarily maltose. I guess that's what these historical profiles are all about.

The historical profiles could also be about getting more complete gelatinization. The amylase enzymes can't do anything with the starch until the chains are gelatinized (basically the chains need to be surrounded by water molecules.) We don't know much about how easily the historical malts gelatinized, nor do we have a lot of info on the grit size distribution that they got from their milling.

Brew on

 

[cire]

Very valid observation. Perhaps the answer could potentially be, somewhat more than the average well informed homebrewer of today.


Malt Mills and Malt Milling (wiley.com)


Starch Conversion in the Mash Tun (wiley.com)

 

[VikeMan]

It can also create maltotriose, a trisaccharide that is fermentable by some yeasts. but not others.

Excellent post. I'll just add that most brewing strains can ferment maltotriose to an extent, and most strains don't ferment all of it. It's the main thing that accounts for the wide range of typical apparent attenuations (given a hypothetical standard wort) among the various strains.

 

[csantoni]

Please post your final gravity once you're done.

Packaged this today. FG was 1.009, exactly what I expected. Notty chewed through it in about 4 days but I gave it another week to clean up. I followed the fermentation times & temps from the recipe and then cold crashed & carbonated. It says to stand for two days then cellar at 10C for 3 weeks. I don't have enough of a pipeline yet (or enough temp controlled storage) to do that so I'll probably be drinking this by the weekend.

 

[dmtaylor]

Oh yeah... you used Notty...... I should have mentioned...... Notty doesn't care about your mash parameters at all whatsoever..... hmm... (40 - 9) / 40 = 77.5% ... sounds about right......

http://forum.northernbrewer.com/t/nottingham-dry-yeast/3189/2?u=dmtaylo2
http://forum.northernbrewer.com/t/adding-sweetness-and-body/6360/9?u=dmtaylo2
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/i-love-nottingham-yeast.670735/#post-8694224
https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/nottingham-attenuation.640929/#post-6924276

 

[cire]

Oh yeah... you used Notty...... I should have mentioned...... Notty doesn't care about your mash parameters at all whatsoever..... hmm... (40 - 9) / 40 = 77.5% ... sounds about right......

http://forum.northernbrewer.com/t/nottingham-dry-yeast/3189/2?u=dmtaylo2
http://forum.northernbrewer.com/t/adding-sweetness-and-body/6360/9?u=dmtaylo2
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/i-love-nottingham-yeast.670735/#post-8694224
https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/nottingham-attenuation.640929/#post-6924276

Wow, wish I'd known that before I stopped using Nottingham, I could have saved me all of the efforts I've always made to get mash parameters in line with my readings.

I gave up on Nottingham because it would leave almost none of the easily fermentable sugars produced by a well regulated mashing regime. Crickey, I could have just poured boiling water onto the grains and called it a day.

 

[csantoni]

This batch is doing things I haven't seen before, and not in a good way.

1. My mash pH was pretty low (4.6) with what I thought was a reasonable addition of 25ml of 10% phosphoric. I've used more in other batches with no issues but maybe the grain bill had an impact. End of runnings pH was more reasonable, 5.6 so I figured I was good to go and maybe had a measurement error on the first one.
2. Fermentation and carbing went as planned and I put 3 gals into a keg and bottled the rest. That was a week ago.
3. Two days after packaging I tried a couple pints from the keg. It tasted pretty good, good malt character, hoppy but not too bitter. However, I noticed that it seemed to immediately give me indigestion. I tested the pH of the end of a glass (room temp and completely off-gassed) and it measured 3.8. That would make sense in terms of what it was doing to my stomach.
4. I let it sit for another four days and took a bottle to a friend's house to share last night. It poured fine, was nicely carbed, but had no taste at all. No malt character, no hops, just bland mildly bitter water. No more acid stomach reaction though. When I came home I tried some from the keg and it was the same as the bottle, just completely flavorless.

I'm at a loss to explain what's going on here. I expect flavors to mellow and blend over time but these just disappeared. I've made a partial mash of this basic recipe before without the crazy mash & ferment profiles and it had a nice malt character and was well balanced, essentially what I was tasting when I first tried this batch but without the high acidity.

This might end up being my first dumper which would be a shame given the amount of effort that went into the brew day.

 

[dmtaylor]

Hmm.... sudden loss of smell and taste................

 

[csantoni]

Hmm.... sudden loss of smell and taste................

Hahaha, yes, this came up while we were tasting it. It’s just the beer though.