Side Mash during an AG brew

[Brewnaldo]

I'm a little dissatisfied with a current brew, well actually a couple of them in terms of finish/body.

And I have been thinking, historically I think I probably find it quite hard to hit and maintain a mash temperature that leaves enough unfermentable to give the beer some body at the end. Everything seems to finish dry these days.


Now it might be as simple as not paying enough attention to the attenuation profile of the yeast but then, I'm settled on W34/70 for lagers so......

Has anyone ever carried out a high temp mini mash to add to the main batch, what I'm thinking here is, 500g to 1kg of pale or Munich for a lager, mashed on the stove top in 2 or 3 litres of water and held way up at like 72 degrees, thus providing a wee boost of non fermentatbles to an otherwise standard 65degC mash.

Can anyone see any issues here, and does brewfather have a method of accounting for this? I can see you can check non fermentable on a grain addition, but it wouldn't ALL be non feremntable presumably.

Any musings appreciated

 

[Nicks90]

I think having a separate mash at that high a temp might add too many unfermentable sugars and result in undesirable sweetness.
Especially in a lager


Can I ask why you struggle to get the right mash temp? Aiming for 68/69c should be a sweet spot for that mix of fermentable and body /mouth feel . Get a feel for your kit and you should be able to gauge the strike temp to get an accurate initial mash temp. Alternatively have 2l boiling water and 2l cold water on hand to make adjustments after you have mashed in.
Then wrap that bad boy up in an old duvet or sleeping bag to minimize heat loss.

 

[Brewnaldo]

I think having a separate mash at that high a temp might add too many unfermentable sugars and result in undesirable sweetness.
Especially in a lager


Can I ask why you struggle to get the right mash temp? Aiming for 68/69c should be a sweet spot for that mix of fermentable and body /mouth feel . Get a feel for your kit and you should be able to gauge the strike temp to get an accurate initial mash temp. Alternatively have 2l boiling water and 2l cold water on hand to make adjustments after you have mashed in.
Then wrap that bad boy up in an old duvet or sleeping bag to minimize heat loss.

Yeah... I am wondering if maybe I am a bit conservative with the temperature. I use the digiboil probe and a seperate one at the top but could feasibly both be a bit out. Maybe I just need to be a bit braver and mash a bit higher, iv just always been a bit wary of going much above 65, and was contemplating whether this method would give more control

 

[nickjdavis]

65 is on the low side....as has been suggested, a few degrees higher will give a better balance and a few more non-fermentables. Also many infusion mashes will suffer from quite a bit of temperature variation through the mash....can easily find as much as a couple of degrees variation in temp...so your 65 could be 63 in certain places. Years ago I used to mash in one of those converted coolboxes and discovered that it had a "cold corner" that was always lower in temp than the rest of the mash.

It will be a lot easier to simply recalculate your required strike water temperature in order to hit a desired (higher) mash temperature than it would be to run a separate minimash....and as has been suggested, a couple of litres of hot/cold water on hand can be used for fine tuning if you are still out a little bit.

 

[Jim Brewster]

Sounds a bit like a decoction mash. You can take out a portion of the mash with a thick consistency and bring it to the boil in a separate pot, while stirring continuously. It looks like quite a lot of effort! It's a traditional method for certain styles, eg Pilsner. Good example here at 11 minutes 40