Stepped Mashing

Twostage · Jan 6, 2016

I'm reading the 'principles of brewing' book by Fix at the moment. Lots of chemical equations which (thankfully) you don't need to understand completely to get the ideas. There are some interesting bits including an explanation for why my wine brews fizzed up when I added more grape juice after a few days of fermentation. It's called the 'pasteur affect' and it's the yeast switching back to aerobic respiration with the introduction of O2 in the juice. They rapidly consume the O2 and give out CO2, hence the fizz.

Anyway, there's a table showing the various reactions that happen during the mash at different temperatures. I thought it would be good to do a stepped mash to effectively sweep through the key temperatures. So I got one of these to control the temperature of my Burco Boiler :-

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/141853626650

Did a test build last night and had it controlling the temperature of a kettle. Worked very well indeed. The temperature reading is amazingly quick and when I compared it with my thermapen it didn't need calibrating.

Going to do a proper build tonight.

cheapbrew · Jan 6, 2016

Sounds interesting, Does it do multiple temp settings, or just one at a time?

JapanBrew · Jan 7, 2016

Yep. That's the STC 1000. Does great things. I use one of mine that way. The STC 1000+ model has different programmable settings which can do that. I might get one of those later since they're good for fermenting fridges. You can set them to crash after certain duration and then back up again.

Twostage · Jan 7, 2016

It's not an STC1000 but it's similar. It is designed to handle loads upto 30amps (the STC only does 10 and my boiler is just over that).
You have to set it for either heat or cool (which is fine in this case). It can only do one temp (which again is fine) but it is quick to do.
As well as the stepped mash test I'm going to use it to get the mash water to exactly the right temp, the Burco gets you in the ball park with setting three but you have to fine tune it by hand before the mash and as you dough in.

Twostage · Jan 16, 2016

Used the controller today. It's really good. It was about 2 degrees this morning (so the grains would be that cold) so the mash water had to be 72. So set the controller to 72, went back inside and when I went back the Burco was at 72. Interesting to see the temperature drop as you put cold grains in.

I knew that even with the sleeping bag over the boiler for the mash it would drop so I set it to the mash temp and at the end of the mash it was spot on.

Recommended.