Jeff Parker from The Dudes’ Brewery (http://www.thedudesbrew.com) and Andy Black from MacLeod Ale Brewing Co. (http://www.macleodale.com) talk to us about getting started home brewing beer.
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Our process is pretty straightforward, we do standard isothermal mash or single-stage mash where we just take all of our grain, mix it together with hot water in our mash tun and sit there for an hour and then we sparge.
[Mash Tun: A mash tun (mash ton) is a vessel used in the mashing process to convert the starches in crushed grains into sugars for fermentation. Most mash tuns are insulated to maintain a constant temperature and most have a false bottom and spigot so that the sparging process can be done on the same vessel.]
It’s pretty basic. It’s a larger version of home brewing with a cooler. But we have the ability of controlling temperature a little bit more accurately than a home brewer would as well as ph equipment and the ability to adjust the PH more accurately than the average home brewer would so that we can ensure more consistency. The other difference between mashing in this scale versus home brew mashing is called thermal mass.
[Thermal Mass: Thermal mass is the term that describes the ability of a material to store heat; something many construction materials can do to a greater or lesser extent]
The ability of that volume in the mash to change temperature has a much stronger buffer to temperature change because it’s such a large mass of more fluid and grain. So it’s less likely to change temperature, an hour long or even longer mash than a homebrew would. Even our test batches, they are relatively similar to our full scale kit. 10 gallons, single layer of stainless steel would easily lose even 10, 15 degrees if we didn’t temperature adjust it. Whereas our full scale system, we could probably leave it for maybe an hour or two hours before we adjust the temperature change.
Temperature and PH and couple other issues with mashing are very complex objects than even I don’t totally understand. But there’s a relationship of PH with other chemical constituents of the water and wort color, temperature and mash ratio that affect fermentability. But basically, the easiest rule of thumb is the lower the temperature, the more fermentable you wort’s gonna be within a certain range. And if you go higher, you’re gonna decrease fermentability. Lower you increase fermentability. And because we’re doing a lot of low alcohol beer, it can be very easily ferment out to a point of dryness that we really don’t want it to hit. So it’s critical for us to hit our target PH ranges and our target temperature range for a given beer and beer style. So that the beer doesn’t end up too dry in which case it can be that the beer can taste washed out or your beer not having enough body. Say we do that to our stout, it can become brown water after a certain point. It ferments too well.