Mashing at 96C by mistake!! HELP!

[rybinss]

I had a similar issue with my klarstein, had heater on 2000w to get strike water temp up, put in grain but forget to reduce wattage to keep it 'ticking over' at 66° luckily spotted this when mash was briefly up to 70°+ and rising ended up ok but lesson learned, drop wattage right down for mash. Agreed though the controller takes a bit of getting used to. Too many pings and chirrups for my liking. Think it will take me a couple more brews to get used to the kit.

 

[clib]

I hope you haven't chucked it? Unless it tasted bad and I doubt it did.

I don't use a fixed mash temperature, I just mash on a low heat to allow the temperature to rise from 50 ish to about 80 when I take the grain out. It takes longer than 20 minutes but conversion doesn't take long. I think your beer would/should be ok. The tannin thing is one of those brewing fables that gets exaggerated IMO. Tannin is one of the flavours in all beer, as it is in tea. There are examples of farmhouse brewers boiling the mash. And decoction mashing involves boiling up to a third of the mash.

 

[gingerneil]

I hope you haven't chucked it? Unless it tasted bad and I doubt it did.

Yep - the flower bed got it. It cost me just a little over a tenner to replace the grains from my local brewshop (with the odd substitution), so no great financial issue. Its only my second AG brew, so keen to try to follow the instructions to make a decent batch. I can start playing about once I've got the basics sorted.

 

[gingerneil]

I had a similar issue with my klarstein, had heater on 2000w to get strike water temp up, put in grain but forget to reduce wattage to keep it 'ticking over' at 66° luckily spotted this when mash was briefly up to 70°+ and rising ended up ok but lesson learned, drop wattage right down for mash. Agreed though the controller takes a bit of getting used to. Too many pings and chirrups for my liking. Think it will take me a couple more brews to get used to the kit.

Tested the temp reading during mash.. The controller was set to 67C and reading pretty much spot on. Manual temp check using a digital kitchen probe gave it with 1C.

 

[Cwrw666]

I know you've dumped it now but why didn't you have a taste first? If it was sweet I'd have used it, if not dumped it

 

[gingerneil]

I did taste it. It was sweet, and I'm sure I'd have made something.. But the taste test of the replacement today was far nicer!

 

[RoboBrewBot5000]

This is what I thought. The odd thing was, when I heated the strike water to 67 all three of my thermometers including the integral one read more or less the same. After I'd added the grain, I'd expect a temp drop, but the temperature of the water when I drew some water off to check the temp of the water was much higher than the reading on the klarstuen unit. This doesn't seem to have affected the fermentability of my recent batch of light lager though, which should have been OG of 1010 but came in at 1004. So I'm just going to keep on checking the temp and tweaking the variables.

If I've missed something here and the grain is somehow magically at the correct mash temp with the water being much hotter....please someone enlighten me!

 

[DocAnna]

I've been away and not around for a while. I appreciate you've thrown it, but it would have been worth keeping and a small adjustment could have sorted it:
Most of the enzymes would have been working on the way up on the temperature so would have done most of their work before you got to 97. This would have been particularly the case with the alpha amylase which accelerates activity up to about 75°C but is still active above this. If you'd strained the wort then remashed with about 250g or so of any pale malt at a slightly lower temperature - about 60°C then the beta amylases in the new grain would have munched through the dextrins well within the hour.