Protein and Saccharification Rest Schedule

[weirdboy]

Higher temperature mash produces more alpha amylase, which ends up giving you a wort with more dextrins.


A lot of all-grain recipes use table sugar, too. In particular, most of the Belgian Strong styles use simple sugars, which in some cases can be up to 20% of fermentables. So, it's not necessarily something confined to extract brewing, although that is one method to achieve a higher apparent attenuation.


So far as balancing goes, I think it just comes down to experience, to be honest. There are too many factors to consider, such as the amount of crystal malt in the recipe, the yeast strain, the mash profile, the simple sugars, etc. I have seen several calculators that try to predict FG using all these factors, but I've never seen one that is particularly accurate in my experience. Beersmith 2 now tries to incorporate this type of stuff into its estimates, but I haven't been too impressed with them in reality. It gets in the neighborhood, I suppose...most of the time. IIRC, Beersmith v1 just assumed 75% attenuation for any yeast and any recipe.

 

[Thunder_Chicken]

I've read that you can convert extracts to more fermentable wort by performing a partial mash with high Lintner grains. Is that really so that you can convert dextrins to more fermentable sugars?

 

[weirdboy]

Dextrins won't convert to more fermentable sugars. At least, not fermentable by saccharomyces. They don't have the appropriate places in their molecular structure for the amylase to break them apart. However, there are other sugars of various levels of fermentability in extract. I am not convinced doing a partial mash with the extract later on is going to lead to a more fermentable wort, but I suppose I wouldn't rule it out without performing an experiment.