Suggestions for keeping BIAB bag off bottom?

[RM-MN]

I guess the question that I have is what did your grain bill look like and what your procedure was to achieve that. If you've stumbled on a faster way to get the same results, many of us would be interested to know how to replicate it.

The main thing that makes a shorter mash possible is the fine milling of the grain and the guts to try it. You can't really do a short mash with the conventional mash tun because if you mill the grains fine you can't get the wort out of the tun. BIAB and the huge filter area of the bag allows the fine milling.

Try a small batch. Mill the grains to cormeal consistency and start a mash with the lid off. Watch how long it takes for the liquid to go from milky to clear. When the liquid clears, the starch is gone, changed to sugars. Now the question is when the dextrines produced by alpha amylase are broken down into fermentable sugars by the beta amylase. I let my mash go anywhere from 7 to 20 minutes after the wort clears to allow time for the beta amylase to work. For my grain milled as fine as they are, that equates to 10 to 20 minutes in the mash. I know from doing several batches that 20 minutes of mashing gives me a very fermentable wort. I need time to do more of the 10 minute mashes to verify the fermentability of the wort produced.

 

[bu_gee]

Two questions/issues I have off the bat:

1. Not everybody is after a highly fermentable wort, such as I. Traditionally, this is attributed to mash temperature and not duration. This is why I was asking about your procedure. I think I wouldn't be able to replicate your results without knowing your volumes (vessel(s), in, out, sparge, etc.) and your temperatures.

2. Doesn't the more finely milled grain hold on to more water? What if any is your sparge procedure?

 

[RM-MN]

Two questions/issues I have off the bat:

1. Not everybody is after a highly fermentable wort, such as I. Traditionally, this is attributed to mash temperature and not duration. This is why I was asking about your procedure. I think I wouldn't be able to replicate your results without knowing your volumes (vessel(s), in, out, sparge, etc.) and your temperatures.

2. Doesn't the more finely milled grain hold on to more water? What if any is your sparge procedure?

Good questions. Here is the grain bill. The batch size was 2.75 gallons in a 5 gallon stainless steel pot.

4LB pale malt (Rahr)
1 LB rye malt (Briess)
4 OZ caramel 10L (Briess)
2 OZ Coffee malt (simpson) late addition

.350 (estimated) Nugget hops 13.5% 28 IBU

Belle Saison yeast

Mashed at 155F. for 20 minutes in 3.75 gallons, pour through sparged with cold tap water to get my pre-boil volume (about 1 qt) of 3.75 gallons.

Note that Belle Saison yeast is a monster. The previous batch had an OG of 1.060 and a FG of 0.995 using roughly the same procedure with the exception that I raised the temperature during the ferment starting at 62 for a week, 2 weeks at 72 and finally finished at 85 for 4 days.

Note also that the finely milled grains don't hold much water by the time I'm done squeezing.

 

[bu_gee]

That is indeed impressive. I wonder if I could replicate it.

Are you adding the grains at 155 and then boosting back or do you add them at a higher temp?

I would want a less fermentable wort than you're creating so I want to adjust my temps accordingly.


I am wondering if most of your conversion happens after you pull the grains out of the starchy water. Do you mash out before pulling the grains? Could you give me a rough sense of the timeline between pulling the grain and starting your boil?

 

[RM-MN]

I bring water to the indicated strike temperature and then stir in the grains. Using a different yeast would make a beer that wouldn't ferment out so far, the Belle Saison yeast seems to be the difference.

I pull the bag of grains out and then turn my stove back on high to get to a boil. While it is heating the water, I use cold tap water to do a pour through sparge and add this back to the pot. With that colder water sparge it takes almost 20 minutes to have the water boiling. The water is no longer starchy when I pull the bag. If you were to keep the pot open and watch, you'd first see the starchy water which is indicated by the cloudiness. That is soon clear as the enzymes convert the starch to sugar. The testing I did earlier with using iodine for the indicator of remaining starch says that happens in less than 3 minutes. It will take longer than that for the beta amylase to break long chain sugars to fermentable sugars which is why I gave this batch the 20 minutes.