Have a rather basic question on mash out.
First I use a fly sparge method. My mash temp is 152° for one hour. At the end of mash do I raise the temp of the entire mash to 170° and then sparge with 170° water or do I simply sparge using 170° water?
Thanks in advance. Prost…
If you want to do a true mashout, you need to raise the grain bed temp to 170 and hold it for at least 20 min. Simply raising the temp as you sparge will not do it. In order to do that, you’ll need water that’s hotter than 170 for the mashout. Once you get to 170, you can use 170 water for the sparge.
Or skip the mashout because it’s usually a wasted effort anyway. But Denny’s right, if it matters.
Does it really have to be 20 min long? I usually give mine around 10, then drain into the kettle. Then again, I am heating the wort as I collect…
I mash-out for 10 min; i am using a 10 gallon cooler for a mash tun, so I add a quantity of boiling water to raise the mash temp to 170. The 10 min rest is to allow the grain bed to settle in preparation for fly sparging.
I mash-out whether I am going to fly or batch sparge. It makes the wort less viscous, so it flows more easily through the grain bed.
Thanks Denny, sounds like I need to raise everything to at least 170 before moving forward… ;D
I have a grainfather so it’s so easy to raise the temp for a mashout. I hold the mashout temp for about 10 minutes, longer if my sparge water isn’t up to temp yet.
On my next beer, I plan to do a cool water sparge after seeing the Brulosophy xBeeriment last week, so I’ll most definitely do a mashout to lock in the mash profile.
If you really want to denature the enzymes, which is the point of a mashout, yes , it does. Otherwise you might as well skip it.
I do not perform a true mash-out, but I do add a boiling water infusion to bring the mash bed up to 160F. Raising the temperature of the grain bed does make a difference in extraction rate when continuous sparging (I will never call the process “fly sparging”).
I agree, I see a 1 to 2 Brix increase in gravity upon mashout. That effect decreases when the mashing temperature was high in the first place, but it certainly is worthwhile to me when I mash around 150F.
I also wouldn’t call the mashout step a waste of energy since you still need to raise the wort temperature to boiling and any energy you’ve already put into the wort is energy that you don’t have to add latter in the kettle.
The mashout step is worthwhile if its not too much of a PITA.
My own take on it is that a mashout can be good thing for thicker beers. This ensures nothing happens if first runnings fall back into beta temps. That can happen easily if you aren’t fastidious about it. Years ago for some reason I never put runnings into the kettle until fully collected and of course temps fell. If you get your runnings right into the kettle I’d say it’s wasted effort. Subsequent runnings should be fine since they are denatured by elevating sparging liquor. I haven’t mashed a full hour for a few years now and when the planets align my wort is boiling as I add last of the runnings…
I skip the mash out and just add 190 degree water to bring the mash up to 170, then I recirculate for 10-15 minutes before draining into the boil kettle.
Sounds pretty close to a mash out.
As we’ve seen with the cold sparge experiments, you don’t need a high temperature to rinse the sugars out of the grain.
I think on the homebrew level, people aren’t getting full conversion in their mash and a bump in temperature helps at the end. You can check your first wort gravity roughly based on the mash thickness, and if it’s low then that is the issue.
http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?title=File:First_wort_gravity.gif
