Multiple temperature mash?

[bmantzey]

Some of the recipes I have say to mash at 122° for 30 minutes and 150° for 60 minutes.

My question is, how do I increase the temperature of the mash water after the first 30 minutes?

The only thing I can imagine is running it off, putting it back into the kettle and bringing the temperature back up, then adding it back to the grain again.

Is this the right idea, or is there some other way, like adding hotter water to it, in order to increase the temperature? Thanks!

 

[HoppyGus]

If you are mashing out of a cooler, I think most people on here would agree to just do the 150 for 60min. That is what I do and get ~85% efficiency.

 

[bmantzey]

It won't affect the outcome of the recipe to deviate in such a way? Would it be bad to reheat the partially mashed wort?

 

[HoppyGus]

I would search for "protien rest" and read about it. I think the grains today don't really need the protien rest for a good starch conversion to occur.

 

[bmantzey]

I actually did do that earlier today. It didn't make 100% sense, so maybe I'll study it a little more closely to understand it. From what I gather though, it's something you want to do when you have, uhh what did they call it, adjuncts (?) such as added fruits or grains like oats, or others and the purpose of that is for beer clarity???

I have also heard that with today's grains, it's not really necessary.

My question isn't really answered though. This recipe I'm looking at calls for rice to be ground and cooked and rice hulls, which tells me that a protein rest might be a good idea for this one (according to what I understand).

So, would draining my mash and reheating it work for this or no?

 

[HoppyGus]

Yes draining and re-heating your wort will work.
The rice hulls are normally used to prevent a stuck mash when using problem grains like rye, oats, and anything else that likes to clog the screen. I don't know that they do much else for the beer.

 

[Scooby_Brew]

Some of the recipes I have say to mash at 122° for 30 minutes and 150° for 60 minutes.

My question is, how do I increase the temperature of the mash water after the first 30 minutes?

The only thing I can imagine is running it off, putting it back into the kettle and bringing the temperature back up, then adding it back to the grain again.

Is this the right idea, or is there some other way, like adding hotter water to it, in order to increase the temperature? Thanks!

Draining the entire wort and heating it separately from the grain would NOT work.

The easiest way to do a step mash with a cooler MLT is to use your boiling kettle as a mash tun, and use the cooler only as a lauter tun. So you mash in your boiling kettle, nice and easy on a low flame, stirring a lot. When you hit your step mash temps you lower the heat to minimum or just turn it off and then give it the recommended time for each step. When you done mashing, you dump the whole mash into the cooler and from this point on you proceed the usual way (sparge, boil etc).

The reason why you want to do a step mash is simply the taste of the beer. Different mash temps give beer different taste and body.

Some other ways of raising your mash temps are adding boiling water into the cooler or doing a decoction. From my experience these methods are more useful for adjusting your mash temps rather then step mashing. Using these two methods you can easily raise the mash temp by 5-7 F, but not by 20-30 needed for step mashing.


Here is John Palmer's "How To Brew", Multi-Rest Mashing: http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter16-2.html

 

[bmantzey]

Sounds do-able, but I'd be afraid of clogging the braided tube in my mash tun. Something is telling me to strain out the grain with a sieve first, putting it into the mash tun first and then slowly adding the wort back into the grain.