All-Grain Brewing – Part 3 – The Mash

The “Mash” is an interesting process in the world of homebrewing. The purpose of the mash is to convert the starches in the crushed grains into sugars that can be fermented later by the yeast. When hot water is added to the grains, enzymes within the grains are activated, and these enzymes are the catalysts that convert the starches to sugars. Different mash temperatures are used to activate different types of enzymes. The enzymes that are activated determine what types of sugars are produced and which types are fermentable by the yeast.

The full recipe for this batch of beer is here:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3402440/Beer/Recipe%20-%20Vienna%20Blonde%2010g.htm

Water Volumes:

It can be a little tricky to calculate your water volumes. Here’s my basic recipe for water volume calculation:

Target volume of beer: 10.5 gallons (water needed = 10.5 gallons)
Grain Absorption: .12 gallon per pound (16.25lbs x .1 = 1.952.21+ gallons)
Mash Tun Dead Space (.25 gallon)
Evaporation during boil: 17% per hour (2.21 gallons)
Boiler Dead Space: .4 gallon

Total: 15.3 gallons (roughly)

It’s kind of important to know how much water your boiler will evaporate off during a 1 hour boil.

One of the BEST tools out there for formulating your own beer recipes is a software program called “BeerSmith” from http://www.beersmith.com. This software will help you formulate your own recipes (all-grain as well as extract and partial mash). It also calculates all your proper water volumes and temperatures and takes the manual labor out of that!

Visit my blog at http://www.mancavemeals.net
Visit my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/mancavemeals

Copyright/Usage Info:

All video and/or still imagery in this production, including intro and exit clips was created by John Setzler / Man Cave Meals. Any music appearing in these videos, whether it be intro, exit, or background music, was created from the royalty free tracks included with the Sonicfire Pro 5 plugin (http://www.smartsound.com) for Adobe Premiere Elements version 10 software.