Making beer-creating a mash

Speaker: Okay. So now we've just finished our doughing in process. All of the water has been brought over from the hot liquor tank, and all of the grain has dropped out of the grist hydrator.

So what we need to do now is we need to mix things up really, really well. And then we are going to take a temperature reading to make sure that the temperature is exactly where we wanted to be. We are looking for something that's around 149-150° Fahrenheit. The mash needs to be conducted at temperatures from 146 that is an acceptable range that runs from about 146° Fahrenheit to about 156° Fahrenheit, mashing at a higher temperature than that or at a lower temperature than that range, you will not be able to get the starch to sugar conversion that you need, and you basically will not be able to produce beer. So it's a one part of the process that you need to focus on more than everything else.

So this is what our mash tun looks like now, like a big bowl of cereal. Okay and we want to make sure that all of the grain is moist and we want to make sure that the water is evenly distributed, so that when we take a temperature reading, we can get an accurate temperature reading of what's inside the tank.

On larger systems very often inside the mash tun there is an automatic mixer, which is basically a set of rigs that run along the bottom of the mash tun that mixes up the mash so that you do get a uniform mash. We like doing things real fashionably, so we are actually using a little bit of elbow grease instead of electricity to do the work.

So we are just finished the mixing. So at the bottom of the tank we have 148°. For a pale ale, you would typically want something along the lines of about 148°0 of the mash temperature because you want the pale ale to be crisp, you want it to be a little on the drier side, to basically be a cleaner beer. If you are doing a beer, if you are doing like a strong scotch ale or something like that, you would mash at a higher temperature because you want the beer with more body, a fuller beer. We are going to let this go to sleep for 45 minutes to an hour and after that point we have these things.


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