The (soon to be) great "How's my crush?" Thread!

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day_trippr said:
I do but I've never taken a pic. I'll try to remember to do that next brew.
Meanwhile, imagine much longer husk pieces that are kind of curly...

Cheers!
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i'd appreciate it....and for the time being i have an image of mini-bananna peels in my head......
 
Good grief ^why^?
Husks are our friends! Especially if they are fluffy and largely intact!
Get your water chemistry right if you're afraid of tannins....

Cheers!
 
day_trippr said:
lol! That makes no sense at all :D
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wait, the math is clear if they charge $1.50 a pound for rice hulls at the brew shop, and you only need like %50-60 barley hulls for an all barley sparge to flow....

but honestly, i'm actually trying not to have a sense of humor here, people tell me it's not any good, and stay true to the founder of the threads intentions, i do look forward to that pic of conditioned malt
 
lmao! Dude, drink some water once in awhile ffs :D

Anyway...I wonder what percentage of barley the husk is by weight, and how that compares by volume to rice hulls.
I have a feeling half the husks from my typical ~20-22 pound grain bills wouldn't amount to all that much volume...

Cheers!
 
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day_trippr said:
Dude, drink some water once in awhile ffs
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yeah well, i'm drinking afternoon coffee now.....for some reason drinking water makes it hard to breath, and i feel like i'm suffocating.....

you are right, i doubt saving barley husks would amount to much...but to jayjay, maybe conditioning would let him keep the husks intact and mill finer for better then 70% effec....
 
day_trippr said:
lmao! Dude, drink some water once in awhile ffs :D

Anyway...I wonder what percentage of barley the husk is by weight, and how that compares by volume to rice hulls.
I have a feeling half the husks from my typical ~20-22 pound grain bills wouldn't amount to all that much volume...

Cheers!
Click to expand...
Tbf beer is mostly water, and contains more minerals and vitamins, so it is like drinking water but even better!
 
Erik the Anglophile said:
Tbf beer is mostly water, and contains more minerals and vitamins, so it is like drinking water but even better!
Click to expand...


i know i fueled it, but i swear i didn't start this...


but who was it that made a comment about drinking water and the nasty things fish do in it, and how he'd never drink it? :mug:

@Jayjay1976 if you feel like smackin some faces and getting this thread back on the rails with your earned "OP" sash on your avatar, feel free, lol :p

edit: i just want to see more crush porn!
 
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I made two videos exploring different crushes and mills speeds. In the end I found the small, "flour" gaps were no better than larger gaps. I now crush at .038" with an RPM of ~45. These videos are on my YT channel listed in the signature if anybody is interested.
 
I have an old school JSP geared malt mill and the gap is not adjustable to my knowledge. I don’t have any fancy geared motors. I run it with an old, corded $39 Black and Decker drill. I try to run the drill as low as it will go, I do alot of start/stop quick bursts. The hopper on the JSP only holds about 2 pounds. It tears through it pretty quick.

Works fine for me as I’m doing 3 gallon batches and my average grain bill is somewhere between 6.5 and 8 lbs.

I’m running my recipes through BeerTools software, putting 83% for efficiency and I’m hitting the numbers spot on. I’m adjusting my mash water with gypsum, since my water report from Ward shows low calcium and low sulfate. Calcium is important to the mash. After the gypsum addition I bring the mash ph into range with a couple ounces of acidulated malt. I had been creating recipes at 70% efficiency prior to adding gypsum and acidulated malt. These 2 minor changes brought me up to 83%. So I agree water chemistry matters. Who knew?

I’m using an Anvil Foundry 6.5 for the mash. Loving the temp control. But I don’t boil in the Foundry. I drain into to my kettle for the boil without pulling the basket. I found I can pull crystal clear wort if I don’t lift the basket. As soon as I lift the basket, the wort becomes muddy.

Thanks for letting me be part of this epic thread.
 
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Just adding some add'l discussion fodder to the mix. I use a Cereal Killer set to a credit card thickness. I double crush and get more flour and smaller bits than what you show. I also am a single vessel BIAB brewer. My palette is not refined enough to discern the nuances you speak of, I am lucky if I can pick out which hop contributed what.
 
Not sure how a good a pic
Crush this am for a steam beer
20210627_084306.jpg
I
 
hout17 said:
Crushed using hand crank no power tools.
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i hope that's a measuring CUP and not a 5 gallon bucket then! otherwise i won't be able to sleep tonight, and i've got to get up early for work! ;) :mug:


i gotta say though, that's a weird looking crush.....
 
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bracconiere said:
i hope that's a measuring CUP and not a 5 gallon bucket then! otherwise i won't be able to sleep tonight, and i've got to get up early for work! ;) :mug:


i gotta say though, that's a weird looking crush.....
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Nah it's a two gallon bucket crushed for a 5 gallon English mild recipe. It's about 7.75 pounds of grain.

Weird? Might be the photo it looks great on my end also might be that I was shaking it as I ground towards the end to make it fit in the 2 gallon bucket so some of the good stuff probably dropped down showing more of the hulls. We are mashing away currently.
 
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bracconiere said:
it just looks like it's a fine crush....but like someone did the rolling pin, or hammer thing to it?

edit: what i'm saying it looks like you sifted out the flour, and added rice hulls?
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It's from shaking the bucket towards the end of the grind which it making it look like it's just hulls. All the good stuff dropped down.
 
Mill set to .034 powered by a old electric motor slowed with sized pulleys to around 250rpm if I recall, built it awhile ago. 15 gallon batches so usually crush 30 to 40 lbs depending on the recipe, never timed it but this might take 5 to 10 minutes. Hmm maybe I'll brew this weekend so I can time it, not that I need a reason to brew but I can add it to the list of reasons.
IMG_20210804_154723.jpg
 
Late to the party here but here's my $0.02.

When I purchased a grain mill about a year ago I decided to crush the life out of my grain. Therefore I had to convert my bazooka cooler mash tun to mash in a bag (or so I thought). There had been a couple of times I struggled with a stuck Sparge ad I thought the bag was going to save me a lot of headaches. As it turned out, I continued having stuck sparges with my MIAB setup...

I decided to revert back to my glory days of the diy bazooka thread and open the gap on my mill. And wouldn't you know (my crush looked a lot like @Jayjay1976) no stuck Sparge and a mash efficiency of 78%.

I'll be sticking with this setup for the foreseeable future.
 
@day_trippr where is the pic of your conditioned and milled grain? I have been waiting to post, but couldn't wait anymore. I have no Idea what my mill is set to. I have a barley crusher that I got with my first Craig's list purchase. Didn't even use it for the first several years, then I thought buying grain in bulk would be cheaper than per brew so I got some vittle vaults and a couple sacks of grain. I read somewhere on here that wetting the grain will help with milling so I started doing that. I use a spray bottle and stray it down until if feels right and run it through my BC. It definately changed to way it looks. The hulls are basically intact and sometimes look like nothing has happened so I have to grab a few and nope it just the hull. Anyway, I have never had a stuck sparge (touch wood) and only since getting an Anvil Foundry did I start using them (edit: them being rice hulls. LOL). I'll have to remember to take some pics of my crush the next time I brew, probably on Sunday. :mug:
 
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lol! Sorry, if I had promised to take a pic of my fluffy milled conditioned malt (which tbh sounds like something I might have done - and as I review the thread, clearly did :)) I must've forgotten. I'll try to remember next time, but bottom line, the whole effort ends up with husks that do look intact or nearly so which in turn allows an even tighter crush without deleterious effects on lautering...

Cheers!
 
There ya go. What was the gap? That would be an .030~.032" here.
I've had people look at that and feel the gap wasn't tight enough, then they actually get their fingers into it and realize the kernels are pulverized...

Cheers!
 
Maltzilla grain mill unsure RPM

Gap as you say 0.75 divided by 25.4 = 0.03 inch

Have done some batches with gap at 0.5 mm (0.02 inch) for half the grain and the rest at 0.75 ( 0.03 inch) no real change to the mash efficiency or sparge still sparges too fast.

On debate about rice hulls they don't exist here in NZ and we have to use oat husks, I think it's a biosecurity issue.
 
Indeed. The first time I milled malted oats I was totally shocked to see how much of an oat "seed" is husk!
I immediately switched my recipes that used oat flakes to use oat malt...

Cheers!
 
day_trippr said:
the whole effort ends up with husks that do look intact or nearly so which in turn allows an even tighter crush without deleterious effects on lautering...
Click to expand...
I’m now a believer in grain conditioning ,,
I tried it for the first time on Sat 8-7-21 just before milling the grains for Biermunchers Cream of 3 Crops .
I was shocked at the difference it made on my crush.
Prior to trying it my husk were either tore up some times causing sparge issues or intact but poor efficiency , could never get a happy medium.
I’ll definitely be doing the conditioned thing in future brews……
 
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Is there a thread on how to condition malt before crushing, and a special mill I would need? Guessing my cereal killer would rust up if I tried using it wet.
 
Ideal conditioning is 2% moisture which is about 50 mL of water and 10 lb of grain. One option would be to spread it out across a large surface and mist it or just seal it up in a bucket with the right amount of water and shake, rattle and roll it.
 

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