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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
		Digest Janitor: pbabcock at hbd.org


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Contents:
  Re: Poorly fermentable wort (Adam Arndt)
  How to use a HERMS system (Bruce Fabijonas)


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Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2011 11:24:42 +0000
From: Adam Arndt <adama at microsoft.com>
Subject: Re: Poorly fermentable wort

Fred,

I have to throw my $0.02 behind Joe's wager on a low diastatic power mash
and hot spots that make a bad situation worse.

Although I find it very difficult to obtain Deg Lintner ratings for Weyerman
malts, most source that have access to this information seem to indicate a
"typical" Deg Lintner rating of 76 for this malt.  (And Weyermann has two
distinct Pilsner products which makes this a bit more difficult without
knowing which one you were using.) As Joe also pointed out there can be
lot-to-lot or year-to-year variations so I think a worst-case of 70 is
feasible.

In any event both of the unmalted wheats are providing 0 diastatic power to
the mash.

The WM Pilsner malt accounted for 50% of the total grist so the mash
diastatic power was 35.5 assuming a 76 deg Lintner malt and as low as 30 for
the entire mash if the pilsner malt had an actual DP of 70 deg Lintner.

That's cutting it very close to the 30-35 Deg Lintner minimum for mashing. 
I would have expected an hour and 50 minutes to still have been enough to
complete conversion.  (As the results of your starch test seemed to
indicate.) I recently brewed a historical porter with a total mash DP of 30.1
and it was still failing the starch test at 90 minutes.

If the mash and the resulting beer now truly pass a proper starch test
there's not too many options left that it could be so I also have to make my
wager on hot spots.

Adam

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Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2011 22:52:48 -0400
From: Bruce Fabijonas <mathbruce at gmail.com>
Subject: How to use a HERMS system

Not as bio-chem heavy as other questions, but here it goes.  

Not too long ago, I built myself a HERMS system. The idea was to do step
mashes and to zero in on mash temp when I undershoot my target temp. My
question is about the set temperature in the hot liquor tank for a given
step. 

Suppose I want to raise the mash from 122F to 151F. Should the hot liquor
tank be set at the target temp (151F), or something higher?  To date, I have
always set my HLT to the target temperature, believing that I don't want to
destroy the enzymes in the wort. I have measured the temperature of the wort
after going through the HLT and found that the wort has risen to the
temperature of the HLT. The problem is that the temperature in the mash tun
changes very slowly. Painfully slowly. In fact, I have seen the temperature
dip before rising. I assume that the coefficients of heat conductivity for
the liquid and the grain are vastly different. One suggestion recently
proposed to me was to raise the temperature of the HLT to something much
higher, even boiling, so that the mash temperature rises more quickly. But, I
argued, think about the enzymes!  The response I got was along the lines of
relax, don't worry....	What about almost boiling wort hitting my grain
bed--can we say tanin extraction?  Again, the response was relax...  

So, what's the consensus?  Am I alone in this quest to save the enzymes?  

Thank you.

Bruce

Sent from my iPad

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