Kitchen Brewing Part 2: The Mash

Always start your session with a beer.

Now that the equipment is together from Part 1, it's time to start brewing. I'll be brewing an English India Pale Ale for my demo batch. The beer's details will be out in a future blog.

Ingredients ready to go.

I'm lucky to have a homebrew shop with a grain mill, so I've crushed my grains at the store. The hops have also been measured out ahead of time to keep things simple. You don't have to do this, but I recommend it.

My setup.

My stove-top setup is pretty simple. Two kettles, a grain bag and a metal spatula are pretty much it. I also like using a hop bag (available for around $5.00), but it's completely optional. If you're doing all-grain brewing, canning pots work best for batches of 2.5 gallons or less. Anything larger and you'll be battling spill-overs. They also work well for partial-mash batches of up to 5 gallons, where you can top off your wort after the boil.

We have achieved mash!

For this 2.5 gal batch, I have 6.5 lbs (3 kilograms) of grains. To keep things simple, I'm mashing with 2 gal (7.6 liters) of water in the first pot. My target mash temp is 152F (67C). I've guesstimated that I'll lose 12 degrees when the grains hit the water, so I've heated my water to 164F (73C). My guess was fairly close. I hit 151.

Into the oven.

When adding the grains, be sure to mix them with the water well to avoid dry spots. This will help with grain utilization. Once you've mashed in, you have a couple of options for maintaining your temp. One is to remove your pot from the stove, cover it  and wrap it in towels or blanket. The other is to cover the pot and stick it in the oven on Warm. I do the later, but both work. I usually mash for an hour. Whatever you do, don't wrap towels around the pot and leave it on a live burner, unless you have a fire-extinguisher handy. Common sense, I know. But I don't want to get blamed for someone burning their home down.

There are varied opinions as to whether to stir the mash every few minutes, or let it sit. I'm kind of OCD, so I stir and check the temp every 15 minutes, just to make sure everything is proceeding as expected. When there's 20 minutes left in the mash, I start heating my sparge water. I'll cover that in the next installment.

Update 8/24/13:

Since I originally wrote this, experience has caused me to tweak my Mashing process. First, is a switch to adding the heated water to the grains, rather than the other way around. I've found that this method makes hitting my target mash temp easier. This is because I can check the mash temp as I add the water. If I hit my temp and have a little water leftover (never more than a cup or two), I save the leftovers to add to my Sparge water.

I've also found that in the Summer, I can maintain my mash temp just fine with blankets around the pot. This is especially true on warm days. Once Winter hits; however, it's back to using the oven. Without it, my temp drops quite a bit, even with a bunch of blankets.