Interpretación de datos y análisis de resultados

When you have all of your

ingredients assembled and your water chemistry dialed in, clear a few hours of your day and get ready to perform an all-grain brew.

1. Crush

Your homebrew store may have crushed your malt for you or you may be crushing the malt yourself. If you’re crushing, see page 26 for more information on the crush size.

2. Mash In

Mashing in is the point at which you’ll combine your brewing liquor (a.k.a. hot water) with the crushed grains. Your recipe will likely specify a water volume and/or a ratio for your mash thickness. We recommend using brewing calculators (see page 233) so that you can fine-tune your own process. For example, even if a recipe recommends a particular

strike water temperature in addition to the mash temperature, the correct strike water temperature for your system will be affected by your ambient temperature and grain temperature on brew day—these are things a recipe writer just couldn’t know. (The term strike water just refers to the water that you will use to mix with your crushed grains.)

For mashing in, you have options. You can add the brewing liquor to the crushed grains, or add grains to the brewing liquor. Of the two, adding your grains to your mash tun, then stirring in water, is the worst option. Stirring water into dry grains frequently leaves little malt balls, pockets of dried malt that can be difficult to break up. However, one small advantage to this method is you do not need to measure your brewing liquor—just keep stirring in water until you hit the correct mash thickness. This also allows you to take the mash temperature when the mash is almost mashed in, but still very thick and—if needed—make small temperature adjustments to your brewing liquor in order to hit your target mash temperature.

If you fill your mash tun with hot brewing liquor, then stir in the grains, you will likely have no problems with malt balls. Plus, it’s a lot easier to stir your mash. However, you need to measure the volume of your brewing liquor before you mash in and you do not have an opportunity to manipulate your mash temperature until you are completely mashed in. If you take good notes and are confident that by knowing your brewing liquor temperature and volume, you can hit your target mash temperature, stirring the grains into your brewing liquor is the quickest way to mash in.

Milling at home is optional. If you do your own milling, check that your crush is not too fine or too coarse (see page 27).

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3. Stir Occasionally and Monitor the Temperature

In most commercial breweries, the mash is stirred continuously. This evens out temperature variation throughout the mixture and increases brewhouse efficiency. On a homebrew scale, stirring will do both of these things, but frequently this comes at the price of losing heat to the environment. If you have a heatable mash tun, stirring the mash a few times (say every 10 minutes) and reestablishing the temperature by applying

heat will likely increase your extract efficiency.

If you are mashing in a cooler, at the high end of the saccharification range (with the aim of getting a less fermentable wort), stirring is not advised due to the inevitable heat loss.

During the mash, your only other task is to monitor the temperature. For single infusion, you’ll just need to keep it in the aforementioned range (either with direct heat or by adding additional hot water). For other mashes, such as step mashes, you may be

following a mash schedule. It’s a good idea to stir the mash once or twice as time goes on so that the temperature remains even throughout.

LEFT:Before you mash, you may want to adjust your water chemistry (see page 29).

RIGHT:Stir as you mash in to prevent grain clumps.

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4. Mash Out

After the mash, you have the option of performing a mash out—raising the temperature of the mash to 170°F (77°C) to make the grain bed easier to lauter and to greatly slow the action of the enzymes.

If you are making wort with moderate to low fermentability, a mash out is highly recommended. If you can’t heat your mash tun and don’t have the room to stir in boiling water for a mash out, you can begin sparging with very hot water, 190 to 212°F (88 to 100°C) until the grain bed temperature reaches 170°F (77°C). At this point, cool the sparge water to hold the grain bed temperature at 170°F (77°C).

5. Vorlauf and Sparge

When the mash is complete, it’s time to move on to lautering with the vorlauf and sparge. Vorlauf is also known as recirculating, and it is done to help the wort run clear (no big grain husk chunks) and to set up the grain bed as a filter. To do this, drain a few quarts of wort out through the valve in the mash tun and into a smaller container (a pitcher works really well). Now take the liquid you drained off and slowly pour it back into the top of the mash tun. Do this a few times until the wort starts to run mostly clear.

Now it is time to sparge. Sparging is the process of rinsing the grain bed with water after the mash to get as much of the converted sugars out of the grains as possible.

Continuous sparging is the most common method of sparging in commercial breweries, although in homebrewing, batch sparging may now be more popular. Often referred to as fly sparging, the continuous sparging method is a process of adding water to the mash at the top of the grain bed in a slow, continuous flow. You can do this very simply by slowly opening the valve on your mash tun and letting the wort start moving slowly into the kettle. At the same

time, you’ll add the sparge water into the top mash tun to try to match the rate the wort is flowing out of the kettle. You can do this manually by carefully pouring water into the top of the tun, or you can employ a sparging device to do the work for you.

Batch sparging is a simpler method than continuous sparging. It’s done just like the name suggests: two or three batches of sparge water are poured into the mash tun, and the mash is stirred, rested, stirred again, and then run off.

Note: Whenever sparging is described, using sparge water at 168 to 170°F (76 to 77°C) is almost always recommended.

The idea is that tannins are extracted from the malt at an unacceptably high rate over this temperature. There are two problems

with this idea. First, the temperature of You can either batch sparge or fly sparge with a sparging device (shown here).

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