Thanks for the updates.
75celsius for " dough in" seems quite high to me. I tended to dough in a couple of degrees above my planned mash temperature so say 67 degrees for a 65 mash on my 35l robobrew.
Yes I did heat whilst doughing in but set at my mash temperature not the dough in temp. Agreed start the 60 minutes once at temp won't do any harm.
Be careful with your flow on the recirculation have just enough water to keep the grain covered. I found that it had to be quite slow at first until the bed settled and as the mash progressed I had to turn the flow up.
You might be getting a really good mash but leaving sugars in the grain, dig to the bottom of the mash pipe when you finish without burning yourself and taste a few grains. If it's sweet then you are leaving sugars behind. Also make sure you stir well at dough in of the grains and perhaps another good stir after 15 minutes just to be on the safe side.
I think 3 litres per kg of grain should be fine for that malt bill, and then sparge slowly with 18 litres.
Mash out a good idea that stops the enzyme activity and then you sparge with water at 76 degrees. I tend to heat the water a degree or two hotter to sparge as it cools running down the tube or in jug etc. so is at 76 when it hits the grains.
Has anyone mentioned ph?
Brewersfriend water calculator also guides with acid additions so even if you dont have a pH measure there will be an indication of the projected pH and what you would need to add. pH of between 5.2 and 5.6 is good for the mash.
Try a recipe that has about 4.5 kg of grain in it, I found that the bigger grain bills were more tricky for efficiency on the robobrew and the volumes meant that the kettle was very full and risk of boilover was high. If you are desperate to get the alcohol level up use some sugar or malt extract but great beer doesn't have to be a 7.5% hop bomb and it isn't cheating as many recipes use sugar.
Just aim for a couple of litres less in the fermenter is another option.
Hi DuncB,
Ok, I can try the doughin a bit lower, one thing to note actually is that at the beginning when i didn't have much equipment I would heat the water in the kettle but now I preheat the water in a 40 litre water heater and pour it into the kettle, I also use this to prepare my sparge water.
Ok I will continue with my countdown from accurate grain bed temperature, makes more sense to me also.
When disposing of my grains I tend to taste the top part and they're kinda 5% sweet but mostly water if that makes sense? is it a good idea for me to stir every 10-15 minutes during mash and then during mash out or is that a no-no?
recalculation is set to about 30% on mash otherwise it just overflows and I end up with grain in the bottom of the kettle which in turns gets sucked into the hole at the bottom which feeds the magnetic pump which then blocks it causing a real nightmare... learnt that lesson haha
the information I got from the supplier has been very conflicting to be honest and leads me to believe they don't know what they're talking about... hence my questions here haha...
Unfortunately if I put less than 23 litres to start it seems I end up with not enough water and it ends up like a cake especially with the Tripel ingredients, or is that correct? I had the question in the back of my mind, what happens if you put too less or too much strike water?
The 40 litre water heater I am using is perfect, I set it to 90c, the water comes out around 77/78 and keeps the grain bed at around 75c for the whole sparge.
Don't know if it helps but the best water I have available is 7- 7.2 ph which is tested weekly and I check the PH strip is that too high the ph? Tap water here is 9ph + and I just wouldn't touch that haha
I have recently bought from another supplier which is a smaller recipe around 5KG so I will see how that turns out on the smaller scale, yes my machine and kitchen floor are regularly a mess too from a nice hot sticky boil over !
To be honest i'm not really that bothered by the alcohol content, i'm happy with 90% of the beer I've made, 2% alcohol is fine as long as it tastes good but i'm after consistency. I would like each batch I make to taste the same if possible but since the ingredients i'm being supplied state the results should be different to what i'm currently getting and i've already had the expected results on the first tries it leads me to think if I continue the way i'm going i'm going to have completely random figures throughout, so i'm trying to workout what i'm doing wrong or if i'm not doing something wrong could it be an external factor, supplier, preparation of ingredients etc?
Thanks very much for your help.
