I'm a newbie here so please play nice. I've got a recipe I'm following that calls for a little bit of Caravienne. While at my LHBS I read that it's better to add this later in the mash. The recipe I'm following doesn't specify a time. Any idea when I should add it? Thanks in advance.
Cara or crystal implies that the grain is already converted. If you want to add all of your converted malts at the end of your mash, you won't be hurting anything. I always add all of my grain bill to the mash tun for the same amount of time (40-60 min). The only exception I can think of is that a pinch of RB might go in at the end of a mash for color.
A reason some brewers might add it later is that malts have an impact on mash pH. Since crystal and roasted malts are already converted, you could keep them out of the mash and not worry about their impact on pH (read: you wouldn't need to adjust the mash chemistry because of their presence). It depends on your water chemistry and other ingredients in the mash. There is a reasonable chance that you wouldn't notice a difference whether you added the caraviene with the other grains or held off and added it towards the end. How much later should you add it? Many people suggest that the bulk of mash conversion happens pretty fast -- maybe 20-30 minutes, and that longer mashes we typically employ are meant to maximize conversion -- I don't have actual numbers to support this but someone probably does. For the sake of argument say 95% of conversion happens early. I'd be pretty comfortable adding it any time after 30 minutes. By that time, the impact of the caravienne on the mash chem and conversion of the rest of the grains would be pretty low. You want to make sure the caravienne has enough contact time with the mash liquid to extract the sugars (their converted, but the still need to get extracted from the grains). You could also steep the converted grains on the side, as per extract brewing. You could steep the grains in the sparge water that you have heated up in your hot liquor tank.
