Malt and Brewing
At this point I'm going to assume you are familiar with the basic principles of brewing. You know what malt, hops and yeast are and have a basic understanding of fermentation. If not then take a look at the earlier categories such as “Brewing…
Malting – How It Works
Malting begins by steeping the barley in water, with the barley absorbing up to half of its weight in water. The water is then drained away and the barley is ready to germinate. The barley is spread out in a layer and kept at controlled temperatures…
Mashing
The term mashing isn’t a good description of what’s happening during this particular stage of the brewing process. What is actually happening is crushed malted barley is being steeped in hot water (which the brewer calls “liquor”) at…
What The Hell Are Malt Enzymes
So we know that mashing causes starch in your malted grains to be converted to fermentable sugars. The things that are responsible for these conversions are malt enzymes. In this article I want to introduce the basics.
What Is An Enzyme
In…
Different Types of Mash
The saying goes “there’s more than one way to skin a cat” and this also applies to mashing your grains. I will run you through the basic mash schedules that home brewers can do and what the benefits of each one are.
Mashing is a process…
The Mash Tun
The most important elements of a mash tun are that it will hold heat well over a duration of a mash of around 60-90 minutes and that the grain can be seperated from the liquor easily, plus it being easy to clean.
There are numerous mash tuns…
Mashing In
Mashing needn’t be thought of as hard. This is the most common conception of why people that I have spoken to anyway don’t make the step from extract to all-grain. If you have ever sat an wondered if your homebrew could be a little more…
Calculating Strike Water Temperature For Mashing
When you first start all grain brewing or partial mash there are all sorts of thing that you need to start worrying about that you might not necessarily need to consider when you brew with kits or extract. Whilst you are a lot more involved…
Separating Wort From Grain
During the mash the enzymes have done the job and extracted the sugars and dextrins from the grain to create a wort, now we need to get the wort out and leave the grain behind. This procedure is called lautering.
Earlier we looked at different…
Sparging
Sparging is the term used to describe rinsing the grain bed to extract as much of the sugar left in the mash as possible, the consequence of this sparge also increases the amount of wort collected from the mash. The liquor used in the mash is…