Mashed in too high, what are the effects?

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Verio

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I mashed in at around 163, and it's slowly dropped down to 158 in the last 20 minutes... what are the effects of too high mash temp?

Thanks
 
What style are you making and what kind of yeast are you using? A high temperature like that is going to have a lot of unfermentable sugars remaining in the beer after it has fermented out. You can anticipate it to be on the sweeter side and full bodied.
 
What style are you making and what kind of yeast are you using? A high temperature like that is going to have a lot of unfermentable sugars remaining in the beer after it has fermented out. You can anticipate it to be on the sweeter side and full bodied.

It's a Fat Tire Clone from AHS. The SG ended up at 1.047, and the recipe sheet says it should be around 1.051.
 
Since you didnt hit your target temp. nor the s.g., Sounds as if this beer will be very full bodied and very sweet. If you suspect your yeast may not attenuate down enough, I myself, would pitch some champagne yeast to dry it out a bit. will also bring up the alc.%. Don't want it to be too cloyingly sweet. even with age, doesnt seem that will calm down at all.
 
Since you didnt hit your target temp. nor the s.g., Sounds as if this beer will be very full bodied and very sweet. If you suspect your yeast may not attenuate down enough, I myself, would pitch some champagne yeast to dry it out a bit. will also bring up the alc.%. Don't want it to be too cloyingly sweet. even with age, doesnt seem that will calm down at all.

I'm pretty sure pitching champagne yeast will not help with this brew. THe "problem" may be that you end up with a higher than expected/desired final gravity because of the amount of non-fermentable sugars from the high mash temp. Champagne yeast cannot ferment non-fermentable sugars. Pitching champagne yeast helps if the original yeast pooped out because of low nutrients or high alcohol content, but there still has to be fermentable sugars in the beer.
 
I'm pretty sure pitching champagne yeast will not help with this brew. THe "problem" may be that you end up with a higher than expected/desired final gravity because of the amount of non-fermentable sugars from the high mash temp. Champagne yeast cannot ferment non-fermentable sugars. Pitching champagne yeast helps if the original yeast pooped out because of low nutrients or high alcohol content, but there still has to be fermentable sugars in the beer.

This is very true
 
... please correct me if I'm wrong here, but a lot of this is speculation anyway. I've been doing quite a bit of research about high Mash temperatures, and unless I went over 170 (which I didn't), there are still fermentable sugars in my Wort. Plus, this is a Partial Mash, and the grains only consisted of 2 lbs, with another 5 lbs of LME.

Not to be a debbie downer, but I don't really think it's going to turn out that bad. I just wanted to know what the effects were of a high mash temperatures, and the worst that can happen is, it's a bit more full bodied.
 
... please correct me if I'm wrong here, but a lot of this is speculation anyway. I've been doing quite a bit of research about high Mash temperatures, and unless I went over 170 (which I didn't), there are still fermentable sugars in my Wort. Plus, this is a Partial Mash, and the grains only consisted of 2 lbs, with another 5 lbs of LME.

Yes, at 163, there will still be fermentable sugars, but there will be fewer of them than if you mashed at 155ish.

Given that you only used 2lbs of grain, it won't have too much of an effect.
 
... please correct me if I'm wrong here, but a lot of this is speculation anyway. I've been doing quite a bit of research about high Mash temperatures, and unless I went over 170 (which I didn't), there are still fermentable sugars in my Wort. Plus, this is a Partial Mash, and the grains only consisted of 2 lbs, with another 5 lbs of LME.

Not to be a debbie downer, but I don't really think it's going to turn out that bad. I just wanted to know what the effects were of a high mash temperatures, and the worst that can happen is, it's a bit more full bodied.

Absolutely correct. You still got fermentable sugars from your partial mash, but your FG will probably be higher than if you had mashed lower. Whether or not this affects your enjoyment of the beer has yet to be determined - that will be a matter of time and personal taste.
 
Well, checked the gravity today, and it's down to 1.012 and fermentation looks completely done. I'll let it sit for another week and then keg it. Tried the sample and it tastes pretty green, but tastes VERY good.
 
The SG ended up at 1.047, and the recipe sheet says it should be around 1.051.

4 Points off, that's pretty darn successful in my book ! Who said the "recipe sheet" was right anyway. Don't sweat a couple digits here or there.
 
Did my first two BIAB sessions today on our stove top. First one was with sparging and I hit 66% efficiency. My second one I tried w/o sparging like you had mentioned and ran into a problem. I forgot to adjust the strike temp of the mash since I was using the full volume. I used 167 F which is what I use when I sparge but since I had twice the volume of strike water I could not get the mash temp to fall below 160 F for the first 45 minutes. Didn't bother doing a mashout since things had been too hot for too long. [I could have fixed this by just adding some ice to the kettle but I didn't think of it at the time. I also could have taken this outside to cool off, but my wife wanted to continue to talk about what will happen when we get the pregnancy test results on Wednesday.] As a result my extraction was lower and this one finished with 62% efficiency. It will still have a ABV over 5% but might have too much sweetness to it.

So will mashing 7-8 degress F drastically alter the taste of the beer? Could adding some amalyze to the fermentor affect this in a good way helping to drop out more of the non-fermenatbles?
 
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