Conditioning your malt allows for less disturbance/degradation of the husk material and therefore less exposure to the acrospire and LOX.
You can use SMB in your conditioning water and dough in shortly after crushing to minimize the effects.
Such as wet milling?
The distinction between conditioned dry milling and wet milling needs to be made.
Conditioned dry milling is what most of us would consider grain conditioning. You treated the grain to a small percentage by weight of water, either treated or untreated, and then mill. This only moistens the husk, making it more pliable and keeping it from becoming shredded.
Wet milling has a few varieties and is difficult to implement at this scale. Bryan and I talked about steam conditioning and steep conditioning, both of which he implemented, and the results were less than stellar, with water uptake being too great to subsequently mill.
True wet milling involves essentially a malt slurry being run through inerted/gassed mills with essentially zero dissolved oxygen.
Good questions…
Don’t forget we proboil/deoxygenate our water before SMB is added… this essentially knocks down DO to .5 or below. Then we add SMB, so the SMB can be the active scavenger.
As Monk stated we know about Henry’s law and while that IS a factor its not the factor that is going to kill you on dough in. Mixing oxygen laden malt with oxygen laden water at high temperatures is.
Please check out our references page on http://www.lowoxygenbrewing.com/uncategorized/list-of-brewing-references/
A good one to start is http://www.lowoxygenbrewing.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Narziss-1986-Journal_of_the_Institute_of_Brewing.pdf
This is true, I have tried “wet” milling and other forms of grain conditioning.
So, I am assuming one can not perform the malt conditioning step with milling, and if mash water is preboiled and SMB treated along with no splashing (underletting) and gentle stirring that DO levels will still be in the appropriate range?
No, you definitely WANT to malt condition. Try to time the crush as close to dough in as possible. For instance I crush when the water is cooling down to dough in temp. The rest you have is correct.
Is that step a make or break? Or does it just provide extra added insurance for minimizing dissolved oxygen ingress?
Its so easy I don’t know why anyone would skip it. The benefits are numerous, for a super minimal amount of work. I wouldn’t say its a break, its more mill dependent, but it can never hurt.
I stopped condition a ways back, not sure why. When I brewed yesterday, I conditioned and the husk difference is easily seen. Tried to limit aeration as much as possible with my system. I’ve never had egg drop soup in my break before. I chilled in the kettle by recirculating through my CFC. Not sure if that is best, but the break left behind was sizable.
IMO, the best way to implement this is to get a large surface area plastic container, dump your weighed out grains in there, spread them around and then start spraying. Spray, mix, spray, mix, until all of the malt just barely sticks to your hand when mixing. It doesn’t take long at all, cuts down on dust and keeps the husk far more intact than dry milling.
Here is what I do
http://www.lowoxygenbrewing.com/uncategorized/grain-conditioning/
Seems like for the LODO process that is introducing a lot of aerated water to the grain, which I thought was to be avoided at all costs.
I’ve been using a large mixing bowl and condition 1lb at a time. Not ideal, but it works for me for now. I think a cement mixing tub and rake will be where I settle in on this process.
I need to mill the night before. I start my brew days at 6am now to avoid the afternoon breeze. I can’t mill on my balcony that early on a weekend.
I would call a lot a stretch… a few oz for 10lbs of grain is far from a lot. I use SMB dosed water personally though.
I’ve started using SMB dosed water for conditioning as well.
How long do you guys wait to crush after conditioning? I’ve been going about 15-20 min and timing it as close to dough in as I can.
Yup, about that.
Have you been able to quantify if the SMB in the conditioning water is doing much? It seems like the huge surface area to volume ratio that is created when spraying would eat up any possible buffering in a big hurry. Then again, if the reaction time of the SMB isn’t too quick (> 10 seconds or something) then I guess the spraying would just mean it would have to deal with the 8ppm of o2 that you can get into water from the air after it had gotten onto/into the malt.
Nope, you are exactly correct. Its more a thing I have done forever and continue to do.