partial mash brewing question

[tranceamerica]

found this recent post by DeathBrewer regarding doing partial mash brewing. This is excellent, and may be the key I've been looking for to "try out" grain brewing w/o the cost of buying a bunch more equipment. Here's what he said:

i'd go for the partial mashing. for pseudo mashing, all you need is a colander and you can do it in 3 easy steps.

1. steep your mash in 1.25 quarts of 150-160*F water for 30+ minutes
2. pour grains and water through colander into brewpot
3. pour some sparge water at 170*F over the colander (still filled with grains) into brewpot

add water to your boil limit, and BAM! you're ready for your boil. plus you've just improved the flavor of your beer and lessened the effects of extract twang.

so, my question is: how much grain, how much water, how much extract?

Normally, I'd use 6-7 pounds of liquid malt extract for a 5 gallon batch. If I wanted to 'cook up' this batch with a mix of extract and grain...how much of each? I'm also going out on a limb and thinking that the 1.25 quarts of water is PER POUND of grain...is this correct?

 

[McKBrew]

Depends on what you want to brew. There are many partial mash beer recipes out there. If you have your own recipe, you'll need to post it and we can help you out more.

 

[BeachBumDeac]

Somebody posted this on another thread earlier and it was VERY helpful.... and it has a lot of recipes

http://byo.com/feature/1536.html

 

[tranceamerica]

Somebody posted this on another thread earlier and it was VERY helpful.... and it has a lot of recipes

http://byo.com/feature/1536.html

oh...I like that...thanks.

 

[c.n.budz]

Here's another link. http://www.bodensatz.com/staticpages/index.php?page=mini-mash

you want to use 1.25 quarts per pound of grain in the mash BTW

 

[Bobby_M]

How much grain? That's tough. You can start with an extract recipe and convert it or find a partial mash (PM) recipe already crafted. The grain you'd put in your makeshift lautertun is all the specialty grain plus as much base grain as you can handle. The great benefit of PM over extract is that mashing actually makes better use of your specialty grains whereby you are now actually getting fermentables from it in addition to flavor and color.

I've done minimashes in a big ol crock pot. Turn your crock pot on, put your 160ºF water in there, mix the grain in, stir. Once you get up to your mash temp, turn off the switch. You can now turn it on for a few minutes at a time if you need to raise the temp.

You can throw it all in the colander but I'd run it through one more fine strainer before hitting the brewpot to get residual husks out.

You can also just mash in your kettle and apply LIGHT heat whenever you need to bump the temp up (stirring like crazy of course).

 

[Revvy]

That BYO article that I posted on another thread is sort of the "bible" for getting started doing it...He uses 4 pounds of grains and an unmodified 2 gallon cooler to mash and sparge in. Later refinements and a followup article somewhere has him adding a folding steamer from k-marts in the bottom of the cooler to lift the bag o grain above the level of the spigot...

There's a great discussion of the process on Basic Brewing Radio

http://www.basicbrewing.com/index.php?page=radio

Scroll down and look for this;

October 4, 2007 - Countertop Partial Mashing Revisited
Chris Colby of Brew Your Own magazine gives us an update on what he's learned about doing partial mashes with a countertop cooler.

This also has useful info as well http://home.elp.rr.com/brewbeer/extract/pres.pdf