P.m. Question

[spottedbass]

well i dont no where to start...but can someone explain the short answer on pm. i looked at the cooler set up and read about what to do but am a little confused....1 quart of water per pound of grain. the water to 150 degrees gets 1 thing water at 165 degrees gets another. do u need a sparge arm? and what makes this different from steeping? i know this is a lot of questions...so if someone has the time to try and explain then thanks ahead of time. i also read how to brew by john palmer...im sure someone will tell me to...and that was about as clear as mud. and does pm work for all grains?

 

[Got Trub?]

A partial mash is a scaled down version of doing an all grain batch. You are only creating some of your fermentables with the mash, the rest will come from (usually) some dry or liquid malt extract. It won't work for all grains, you need to use a base malt or malted grains that have some diastatic power such as munich. You can mix in a portion of grains that don't have any active enzymes such as crystal malts or roasted malts. The water to grain ratio is important as you are perfomring a biochemical reaction in which the concentration of substrate and enzymes is important. The temperature of the water you add to the grains will be approximately 165F, you want the mixture of grains and water to be around 150F for the enzymatic reactions to take place over about 60 minutes. You then need to rinse out the water and sugars from the grain, you can do this using a batch sparge which wouldn't require a sparging arm or improvise some other way to rinse the grains. Try reading the wiki here and then Palmers book again, it will all start to make sense...

GT