Arrheinous
Well-Known Member
My average all-grain brewday (dragging everything out to cleaning up a two-vessel system) can take 6-8 hours and I thought excluding the boil/chiller process would maybe speed that up. What's presented here got me down to 5 hours but with slightly better planning 4 hours is achievable.
This is kind of a long post but it's a compilation of most everything I've learned in 2.5 years of brewing which may be helpful for anyone starting out.
There's a few beers out there you can do no boil on, berliner weisse is the only one that calls for it. I've also heard of some commercial examples that don't do a boil for things like hefes and wits but at least take the wort up to boiling to sterilize.
Without a boil you can expect to run into some issues:
-Wild microbes: Mashing out at 170F for several minutes is good enough to kill off most things in the mash. But some strains of lacto form spores that will protect them to even higher temperatures. These lacto spores will be present later on to sour the beer. If you don't want a sour beer then a fast attenuating yeast and getting it into kegs or chilled ASAP is desirable.
-Poor hopping: Mash hopping isn't very effective either. You can scrounge a few IBUs from putting hops into the mash. This lesser bittering encourages drier beers which don't do well with heavy bitterness anyway. A cereal mash or decoction mash, however, is a point in the process where you do have boiling water with malt in it. In this experiment I use a cereal mash to try and get more bitterness which may help to counteract surviving lacto.
-Cloudiness: You won't get proper break formation which will lead to a lot of haze. This haze is suitable for wheat beers. That protein may also add a bit of grittiness to the texture of the beer. However from the Great Trub Experiment, leaving a lot of trub in the fermenter looks it can help to pull proteins and extra haze out of the beer.
-DMS: Without a boil there's no good way to remove DMS. If you intend to keg, apparently you can use CO2 to scrub DMS out of the beer. I'm switching to US 2-row to minimize this and to help with the cereal mash anyway. Saisons generally call for pilsner malt but oh well, we're talking about one of the more versatile styles anyway. If DMS becomes an issue then I'll try the CO2 purge. Maybe there's a way to avoid generating DMS in the first place but that calls for more background reading.
The Recipe:
I've been working with rye malt a bit so I wanted to try my hand at a cereal mash with unmalted rye berries from a whole foods store. Later on I strategized to use this cereal mash as my main means of getting some IBUs.
5# Briess 2-Row (49.4%)
3# Avangard Wheat Malt (29.6%)
2# Rye Berries (19.8%; entered in Beersmith as Rye Malt)
2oz Gambrinus Honey Malt (1.2%)
1oz Aurora (7.5% AA)
1oz Styrian Goldings (4.5% AA)
Cereal mash: 2# rye, 1# 2-row, hops @ 154F, 15min; boiling, 30min
Use cereal mash + room temp water to start main mash
Main mash: 1.28qt/lb grist ratio, 152F sach rest, 2 hours; 170F mashout, 10 minutes; 0.5# rice hulls
1L WLP565 Belgian Saison yeast after overnight cooldown in bucket
OG 1.044 (67% efficiency); predicted ABV 4.3%
5.5 gallons collected
Might add 0.65# of table sugar to simulate SG of honey for honey malt (OG 1.049, 5.2% ABV)
Brew Day:
I wanted to use as little equipment as possible so with a 4G stainless pot and my cooler mash tun I was able to calculate all volumes and temperatures needed to simplify the process a bit.
I started with the cereal mash (2# rye berries with 1# 2-row in 2G water). Rye berries are rock hard so make sure you have a good grain mill because I couldn't blender them or beat them down with a rolling pin. Hops were added to the 2G of water and brought to strike temp. I mashed the grains for 20 minutes on the stove at 154F. Then this was raised to boiling for 30 minutes to finish off the cereal mash and get the AA from the hops. Beersmith estimates that a 30 minute boil in 2G with the 3# of grain and 2oz of hops will give ~40 IBU for the final 5.5G, compared to less than 10 IBU for mash hopping. That's unlikely but the boiled hops will continue on to the mash to continue extraction.
The boiling cereal mash was added to 1.2G of 68F water plus 7# of 68F grain to get my sacc rest of 152F. This somewhere between the suggestion for a wit (154) and the upper limit for a saison (150). As I'm expecting a bit of souring to occur I felt that mashing a bit higher was okay. The mash went for two hours due to the time it extra 30 minutes it took to get my strike water to boiling. Also note that Akron, OH's boiling point is 210F so recreating this elsewhere needs some finetuning to hit your temps.
1.5G of boiling water brought the mash up to 170F for 10 minutes to mash out. A mash out is definitely needed here since this is the best chance you have to pasteurize the wort when not boiling it. This will also lock in the mash character which is important because the overnight cool down before I pitch the yeast might cause the wort to thin out further if the enzymes aren't denatured. This overnight, no chiller cool down is often used in places with restrictions on water usage so I'm confident it'll work out. It's also important to note that everything beyond this point is going to be sterile (sparge water needs to be hot, sanitize paddles and fermenter, etc.).
I get 3G of first runnings at 1.058 SG @ 82F (corrects to 1.059 @ 68F) in a sterilized 6G fermenter bucket. A fermenter bucket was chosen since it was probably too risky to collect hot wort in a glass carboy and a Better Bottle might deform at those temps. This also lets me put the fermenter out on the back porch to cool without exposure to morning light. Collected the rest of the 5.5G volume by using 170F water. A bit of anti-foaming agent was added to help keep the brew in the bucket given the potential for some wild fermentation.
Since I wasn't running a chiller I sealed up the fermenter and put it outside to cool down overnight. The airlock had some Starsan in it but I expect a possible coolship-like effect as it pulled in air during cooling. Twelve hours later the wort was at 75F, I took an OG reading (1.044) and pitched the WLP565. No souring or DMS tasted, it's nicely sweet with the 2oz honey malt which I think works well against the rye. The wort is quite cloudy, very much like a wit which suits the grain bill if I chose to go with Belgian wit yeast instead of WLP565. Those strains seem to be more temperamental that Dupont though.
Fermentation:
I'm on day two of the fermentation. My schedule is to start at 75F (24C) and ramp by 1C each day to 85F (~30C) over one week, then hold at 85F for one week. With the WLP565 Dupont strain you really need to push it to high temperatures to get it to finish out.
That was enough to ferment out the last saison at 1.066 down to 1.006 in two weeks. Faster fermentation hopefully implies I could keg and chill the beer faster if I wanted to head off any souring. That bigger saison had 5% of the wort soured for a week which came out great it - I'm not too worried about this beer getting some lacto character. I'll compare that controlled example to the current saison as it goes along. Worst comes to worst it can always be blended.
With the 2oz of honey malt for flavor it might be fair to add table sugar to simulate the SG honey contributes while also upping the final ABV to more like 5%. I calculate 0.65# of table sugar would do it, after scaling for the lower efficiency (67% instead of 75%).
Next Steps:
Now that I have some practice with cereal mashing I can use that as a means to get higher IBU by adding hops to the cereal mash for a no boil IPA or something. This is hopefully an ace in the hole against too much lacto activity as you get with a mash hopped berliner. A competitive yeast like a Belgian strain or WLP001 will help too.
This has also helped to figure out what my efficiency would be without collecting my usual 6.5G pre-boil volume. 67% ain't bad given the inherent difficulty in working with 50% wheat/rye in the mash plus no extra sparge water. The cereal mash also implies adding a high protein cereal grain which helps maintain good body even if you end up with low efficiency or wild microbes threaten to dry it out too much.
As I said, this process took my 6-8 hour brew day (I'm slow and steady) to 5 hours but the extra 60 minutes of figuring out how to grind the rye and getting the mash out water ready can be avoided to do this in 4 hours. That saved a few hours but I spent a week researching some of the finer points and crunching the numbers to hit my temps and volumes. :cross:
Is it worth it? We'll see. I don't know what to expect from any lacto or other microbes that survived mash out or were introduced to the fermenter as it sucked in air during cooling. I'll update with tastings and pictures of any sort of pellicle that forms.
I've picked some ideas from a few 'no boil all-grain' threads around a couple forums. Much of that seemed to be second-hand reports or just planning. At least now there's a solid example here and if it works I'll continue to refine this. Oldsock's book and blog have also lent a lot of confidence to experiment and wisdom to do it with greater chances of success.
This is kind of a long post but it's a compilation of most everything I've learned in 2.5 years of brewing which may be helpful for anyone starting out.
There's a few beers out there you can do no boil on, berliner weisse is the only one that calls for it. I've also heard of some commercial examples that don't do a boil for things like hefes and wits but at least take the wort up to boiling to sterilize.
Without a boil you can expect to run into some issues:
-Wild microbes: Mashing out at 170F for several minutes is good enough to kill off most things in the mash. But some strains of lacto form spores that will protect them to even higher temperatures. These lacto spores will be present later on to sour the beer. If you don't want a sour beer then a fast attenuating yeast and getting it into kegs or chilled ASAP is desirable.
-Poor hopping: Mash hopping isn't very effective either. You can scrounge a few IBUs from putting hops into the mash. This lesser bittering encourages drier beers which don't do well with heavy bitterness anyway. A cereal mash or decoction mash, however, is a point in the process where you do have boiling water with malt in it. In this experiment I use a cereal mash to try and get more bitterness which may help to counteract surviving lacto.
-Cloudiness: You won't get proper break formation which will lead to a lot of haze. This haze is suitable for wheat beers. That protein may also add a bit of grittiness to the texture of the beer. However from the Great Trub Experiment, leaving a lot of trub in the fermenter looks it can help to pull proteins and extra haze out of the beer.
-DMS: Without a boil there's no good way to remove DMS. If you intend to keg, apparently you can use CO2 to scrub DMS out of the beer. I'm switching to US 2-row to minimize this and to help with the cereal mash anyway. Saisons generally call for pilsner malt but oh well, we're talking about one of the more versatile styles anyway. If DMS becomes an issue then I'll try the CO2 purge. Maybe there's a way to avoid generating DMS in the first place but that calls for more background reading.
The Recipe:
I've been working with rye malt a bit so I wanted to try my hand at a cereal mash with unmalted rye berries from a whole foods store. Later on I strategized to use this cereal mash as my main means of getting some IBUs.
5# Briess 2-Row (49.4%)
3# Avangard Wheat Malt (29.6%)
2# Rye Berries (19.8%; entered in Beersmith as Rye Malt)
2oz Gambrinus Honey Malt (1.2%)
1oz Aurora (7.5% AA)
1oz Styrian Goldings (4.5% AA)
Cereal mash: 2# rye, 1# 2-row, hops @ 154F, 15min; boiling, 30min
Use cereal mash + room temp water to start main mash
Main mash: 1.28qt/lb grist ratio, 152F sach rest, 2 hours; 170F mashout, 10 minutes; 0.5# rice hulls
1L WLP565 Belgian Saison yeast after overnight cooldown in bucket
OG 1.044 (67% efficiency); predicted ABV 4.3%
5.5 gallons collected
Might add 0.65# of table sugar to simulate SG of honey for honey malt (OG 1.049, 5.2% ABV)
Brew Day:
I wanted to use as little equipment as possible so with a 4G stainless pot and my cooler mash tun I was able to calculate all volumes and temperatures needed to simplify the process a bit.
I started with the cereal mash (2# rye berries with 1# 2-row in 2G water). Rye berries are rock hard so make sure you have a good grain mill because I couldn't blender them or beat them down with a rolling pin. Hops were added to the 2G of water and brought to strike temp. I mashed the grains for 20 minutes on the stove at 154F. Then this was raised to boiling for 30 minutes to finish off the cereal mash and get the AA from the hops. Beersmith estimates that a 30 minute boil in 2G with the 3# of grain and 2oz of hops will give ~40 IBU for the final 5.5G, compared to less than 10 IBU for mash hopping. That's unlikely but the boiled hops will continue on to the mash to continue extraction.
The boiling cereal mash was added to 1.2G of 68F water plus 7# of 68F grain to get my sacc rest of 152F. This somewhere between the suggestion for a wit (154) and the upper limit for a saison (150). As I'm expecting a bit of souring to occur I felt that mashing a bit higher was okay. The mash went for two hours due to the time it extra 30 minutes it took to get my strike water to boiling. Also note that Akron, OH's boiling point is 210F so recreating this elsewhere needs some finetuning to hit your temps.
1.5G of boiling water brought the mash up to 170F for 10 minutes to mash out. A mash out is definitely needed here since this is the best chance you have to pasteurize the wort when not boiling it. This will also lock in the mash character which is important because the overnight cool down before I pitch the yeast might cause the wort to thin out further if the enzymes aren't denatured. This overnight, no chiller cool down is often used in places with restrictions on water usage so I'm confident it'll work out. It's also important to note that everything beyond this point is going to be sterile (sparge water needs to be hot, sanitize paddles and fermenter, etc.).
I get 3G of first runnings at 1.058 SG @ 82F (corrects to 1.059 @ 68F) in a sterilized 6G fermenter bucket. A fermenter bucket was chosen since it was probably too risky to collect hot wort in a glass carboy and a Better Bottle might deform at those temps. This also lets me put the fermenter out on the back porch to cool without exposure to morning light. Collected the rest of the 5.5G volume by using 170F water. A bit of anti-foaming agent was added to help keep the brew in the bucket given the potential for some wild fermentation.
Since I wasn't running a chiller I sealed up the fermenter and put it outside to cool down overnight. The airlock had some Starsan in it but I expect a possible coolship-like effect as it pulled in air during cooling. Twelve hours later the wort was at 75F, I took an OG reading (1.044) and pitched the WLP565. No souring or DMS tasted, it's nicely sweet with the 2oz honey malt which I think works well against the rye. The wort is quite cloudy, very much like a wit which suits the grain bill if I chose to go with Belgian wit yeast instead of WLP565. Those strains seem to be more temperamental that Dupont though.
Fermentation:
I'm on day two of the fermentation. My schedule is to start at 75F (24C) and ramp by 1C each day to 85F (~30C) over one week, then hold at 85F for one week. With the WLP565 Dupont strain you really need to push it to high temperatures to get it to finish out.
That was enough to ferment out the last saison at 1.066 down to 1.006 in two weeks. Faster fermentation hopefully implies I could keg and chill the beer faster if I wanted to head off any souring. That bigger saison had 5% of the wort soured for a week which came out great it - I'm not too worried about this beer getting some lacto character. I'll compare that controlled example to the current saison as it goes along. Worst comes to worst it can always be blended.
With the 2oz of honey malt for flavor it might be fair to add table sugar to simulate the SG honey contributes while also upping the final ABV to more like 5%. I calculate 0.65# of table sugar would do it, after scaling for the lower efficiency (67% instead of 75%).
Next Steps:
Now that I have some practice with cereal mashing I can use that as a means to get higher IBU by adding hops to the cereal mash for a no boil IPA or something. This is hopefully an ace in the hole against too much lacto activity as you get with a mash hopped berliner. A competitive yeast like a Belgian strain or WLP001 will help too.
This has also helped to figure out what my efficiency would be without collecting my usual 6.5G pre-boil volume. 67% ain't bad given the inherent difficulty in working with 50% wheat/rye in the mash plus no extra sparge water. The cereal mash also implies adding a high protein cereal grain which helps maintain good body even if you end up with low efficiency or wild microbes threaten to dry it out too much.
As I said, this process took my 6-8 hour brew day (I'm slow and steady) to 5 hours but the extra 60 minutes of figuring out how to grind the rye and getting the mash out water ready can be avoided to do this in 4 hours. That saved a few hours but I spent a week researching some of the finer points and crunching the numbers to hit my temps and volumes. :cross:
Is it worth it? We'll see. I don't know what to expect from any lacto or other microbes that survived mash out or were introduced to the fermenter as it sucked in air during cooling. I'll update with tastings and pictures of any sort of pellicle that forms.
I've picked some ideas from a few 'no boil all-grain' threads around a couple forums. Much of that seemed to be second-hand reports or just planning. At least now there's a solid example here and if it works I'll continue to refine this. Oldsock's book and blog have also lent a lot of confidence to experiment and wisdom to do it with greater chances of success.
