New to brew

[Stuart Russell]

Hey, I have recently started brewing and so far so good.. I'm just having a slight problem. Iv been following recipes and after the mash I have to raise the temp to 75 for ten mins.. now when I do this I add boiling water to my mash tun which can sometimes be 10 litres to get to 75.. so then I have to sparge which seems pointless as I need a preboil volume of 22 litres and once I get 22 in the kettle there is still loads left in the tun, for example yesterday, I had a pre boil of 5.8 gallons but this left 3 gallons still in the tun, and the level never gets low enough to uncover the grain which I would have thought is when you should start rinsing? Any help much appreciated

 

[GerritT]

Welcome! :small

Yup, the watermanagement. If it doesn't work, stop doing it and try another way. No way you're going to boil away 3 extra gallons. So, what I'd do (and actually do) is

I have a 20 liter pot. Meaning 20 liter is BRIM. Say I have a recipe for an ale, scaled down to 16 liters tells me I have a bit over 4 kilos to mash. Meaning I'll lose about 4 liters, soaked up by the grain. And I want the malt to have a decent bath so every kilo gets 3 liters of water. Nice and spacey.

Heating up 12 liters to 72º-ish, dump the malt into grainbag, level rises to about 15 liters. Soak for an hour or so (I have a selfmade oversized tea cosy from radiator foil. It works). Turning stove back on, stir until 75º, leave for another 10 minutes under the tea cosy again.
Remove grainbag with malt, drop onto false bottom or sieve (whatever you use for sparging). I had 12 liters, now there's 8 liters in the pot, meaning I get to use another 8 liters to rinse, at the least.

I aim for about 17 liters at the start of the boil, to let the hops whirl. Gonna lose 10% during the boil, then a colander or sieve with cheese cloth for filtering, leaves me on average with 15 liters in the fv. Add a liter of fridge-cold water for cooling purposes and it's done.

Sometimes the recipe isn't taking in consideration what the average homebrewer has for equipment. So one has to take the recipe not too literally.
Did you start out with extract or straight into allgrain?

 

[Oneiroi]

I assume you’re mashing in a cooler or something that you can’t just stick on a burner/stove to heat up?

I brew BIAB too so don’t know too much about 3 vessel brewing but I’d assume your main options are:

1) Reduce mash volume (less to heat and more space in the tun)
2) Skip mashout water additions and use extra hot sparse water to have a similar effect (I think there’s some tannin questions with hot sparse water)
3)Do a pseudo decoction by pulling off a portion of your mash liquid, boiling it then adding it back in to raise temp
4)skip the mashout (I don’t really know what the implications are for this)


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[Gerryjo]

A lot of the time I wouldn't bother with a washout as I have a 52 litre mashtun which will take a damn big grain bill of needed and water needed.
It really all depends on time for me.

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[rank_frank]

I used to use a picnic cooler mash tun and never bothered with the 75C mashout. I have a Grainfather now and include this step just because I can but I'm not convinced that the beer tastes any different.

 

[Ben2083]

Not sure what equipment or method the OP is using but I am using three vessel with a coolbox mashtun and I used to add boiling water to reach a mashout temp and was running out of space in my mash tun before getting to mashout temp.
Nowdays I don't bother, after the main mash I sparge with ~76degC water and see this as being equivalent step really as I sparge for much longer than 10mins whilst transferring to the kettle.

 

[Stuart Russell]

Hey thanks guys, I use a three tier coolbox setup, I will try just with the sparge then because as ben says the mash tun is almost to the brim for me to get it to 75.. thanks again

 

[Dutto]

Welcome to the Forum. :thumb:

Personally, I type out and follow a Check-List with what I wish to achieve and how I intend to do it.

I then note down any failure and adjust "The Plan" accordingly for the next brew.

I use this as a "Rule of Thumb" for Mashing:

Strike Water = 2.6 litres per 1kg of grain.
Mash at:

• 55*C to 66*C (High Alcohol - dry) or
• 68*C to 72*C (Low Alcohol – sweet)

for one hour.

DO NOT exceed 75 degrees.
Stir after 20 and 40 minutes.

Heat SPARGE water to 80*C.
Lauter until wort runs clear and then Sparge at one litre per minute.
Stop sparge when Boiler full .​

It works for me!