Explain It To Nick: Mash Thickness

From Kai Troester’s blog:

“A significant difference was however found in the efficiency. The brewhouse efficiency of the thick mashes remained almost constant between 58 and 60% over the temperature range of the experiments, but the brewhouse efficiency for the thinner mash showed a strong dependency on the temperature and was always better than the efficiency of the tick mash. That leads to the conclusion that thinner mashes perform better and allow for better extraction of the grain.”

Results are presented in Figure 18: http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.ph...ity_and_efficiency_in_single_infusion_mashing

Cheers!

 

I don’t know the exact ratio (I eyeball it), but I definitely prefer a thinner mash. Easier to work with, extraction is better, less chance of sticking the lauter.I have always felt the 1.25 standard is way too thick.

Regardless of thickness, you always want a couple of inches of water above your grain bed during the lauter. Too much or too little and you will compact the grain bed.

 

Thickness doesn't matter much at all... within a range of about 0.8 - 3 qts/lb. It's all good. Stupid variable, certainly just about the least of your worries on this planet.

FWIW, I typically target anywhere from about 1.2-1.8 qt/lb, just because it "seems right to me".

Cheers.

 

If you are batch sparging, I would encourage you to use boiling water or very hot water 190-210 F. That's the only way it will come up to mashout temp of 168 F that you desire. Otherwise I know for my batch sparging I can only hit upper 150s or 160 F if I used sparge water temp below 190 F. There are zero drawbacks to using near-boiling water, contrary to what some texts will claim.

Seems you are reading a lot of outdated texts, grasshopper. If you have more questions, I'll be happy to debunk more of them for you based on real life experience, which includes my own experience as well as confirmation by many many others.

 

The reason to add hot water at a temperature that will settle out at 168-170F is to deactivate enzymes and therefore "lock in" (somewhat) your wort fermentability profile. This is call a mashout.

 

I've never needed a mashout water temperature anywhere near 210 to reach 168-170. Most of my mashouts use water that's less than 190F.

ETA: but the idea is that the temperature settles fairly quickly to 168 or 170 (or whatever), so the grains are not spending much time in the tannin danger zone.

 

I think there are some standalone on line calculators for that. But AFAIK, none take the thermal capacity of the mash tun into consideration. So when people use them, they have to guess (or know from experience based on the equipment/batch size/recipe) at how much higher to heat the water to account for that. But if you want an "all in one" type solution, take a look at BrewCipher. It's free and the author is pretty much always around.

 

Nope, nothing detectable anyway.

 

I have my own spreadsheet which includes mash tun thermal capacity. If I can figure out a way to share it on Google docs or something, maybe I'll put a link up. I'm at work right now, so maybe later.

 

My thought is you need to use a calculator, spreadsheet, or program for this. Don't guess. (BTW, mash length doesn't affect water volumes needed.)

 

ETA: didn't mean to seem flippant about this, but there are also other factors that go into it. For example, the amount of hops you're using (and thus losing wort to).

 

I had to make assumptions on several of the variables here, including pounds of grain, grain temperature, etc., but if I'm in the ballpark, my calculator suggests you probably need to use boiling water to sparge. Volumes are all given in both gallons and quarts. If you have tweaks, let me know and I'll show you how it looks.

 

Losing 8 quarts?! Where, specifically? Needs to be spelled out in detail.