Today marks a rather seismic moment in my brewing skills: I spent more than I should have and bought a mash tun.
This may not seem that exciting if you don’t know me, but any other brewer who has cut their teeth brewing on extracts or dabbled with partial mashes (as I have for my past half-dozen batches), you will probably appreciate why this is such a fun (if not slightly terrifying) step.
As a brief explanation of how a mash tun works, you need a cursory understanding of how beers are made. Of course, beer primary of (and almost exclusively of) four ingredients: water, grains, hops, and yeast. Water is easy, as it comes from the tap. Hops are all the rage in beer, since they are so varied in their smells and flavors and produce wonderfully delicious tastes. Yeast is what gives us our alcohol, converting the sugars from the grains into alcohol, and turning wort into beer. The grains, however, are the definitive backbone of any beer, as they are what give the yeast the sugars to feed on, the color of the brew, and much of that flavor profile as well.
The grains, however, don’t just waive the white flag at boiling water and release their sugars. Extracting the sugars from malted grains (usually barley or wheat, but occasionally oats or corn) requires quite a few steps, time, and a very specific temperature range. Most entry-level home-brewers don’t have the time, equipment, or conceptualizing of how the grains release their sugars to get all of their fermentables from malted grains to simply use the grain for sugars. The process of extracting sugars from malted grains is called “mashing,” and terrified me mightily my first dozen batches. All of the really good homebrewers did it, and I knew I wanted to do it, but every time I started looking into it, I threw my hands up and said “my beer’s good as it is right now. Someday I’ll learn how to do it…but not today.”
An overwhelming majority of homebrewers start out using pre-extracted sugars for their fermentables, a process called “extract” brewing. These come in powder or liquid form, and are simply the sugars extracted from grains during mashing, but in a simple, add-to-you-boil-and-voila kind of way. You can make excellent beers from extract, especially if the extract is fresh. I’ve made beers that I loved from extract, and had others that were even better. It’s also considerably faster to brew extract batches, as they do not require the lengthy process of mashing your grains (which often takes about an hour and a half or so to complete).
So why not stay with extract? It’s faster, easier, and produces great beer. A number of reasons:
1. Extract costs about $4.00 a pound. Grains cost a quarter of that. It is considerably cheaper to mash your own grains in the long run, often cutting the cost of a batch in half, if not more. However, you do have to buy equipment to do so, which often offsets any savings for quite a few batches.
2. You have a great deal more control over your flavors, as you are controlling down to the smallest amount what sugars are in your beer. This allows you to do much more complicated beers, as well as beers that have to be mashed, as there is an ingredient that does not have an extract (like oatmeal or corn, as well as some other barley varieties that add body or color).
3. The most important reason: it’s awesome. It’s how beer was made for centuries before extract existed, and personally, I think it’s awesome if you can make great beer from the more complicated process.
So long story short: I spent the money today and got a mash tun, which is a piece of equipment that allows me to mash grains. It’s essentially a Gatorade cooler like you see at high school sporting events or in the NBA, modified to have a perforated mesh bottom that allows water through, but not the grain husks. It also has an industrial spigot instead of the push-down tap, which is way better for handling very hot water. To make a complex process as simple as possible, essentially you dump your grains into this cooler, pour hot water on at a specific temperature, and stir it all together. Most of the time, the water temperature needs to be held around 150-154 degrees Fahrenheit for about an hour. During this time, the water cooks the grains to a hot enough temperature to release their starchy sugars, but not too hot to destroy the enzymes that help convert those starches to sugar. It’s a happy medium. Too hot, no enzymes, and a beer that is very sweet. Too cool, no sugars, less alcohol. Both are not fun problems to have. The cooler works so well because it’s so insulated, losing temperature very slowly, and can keep that heat very even and controlled. After an hour, you run off the water in your mash tun into your kettle, running some fresh hot water over the top of your grains to get every last bit of fermentable sugar out. And voila! You’ll have your wort to brew from grains instead of extract from the store!
But now I have that equipment, and I’ll be putting it to use on that chocolate stout tonight. Hopefully it turns out and is as delicious as last time, since if so, it’ll be from a much higher degree of difficulty. And therefore that much more satisfying. Recipe and results to come later, but wish me luck…hopefully I’m not going to need it.
This may not seem that exciting if you don’t know me, but any other brewer who has cut their teeth brewing on extracts or dabbled with partial mashes (as I have for my past half-dozen batches), you will probably appreciate why this is such a fun (if not slightly terrifying) step.
As a brief explanation of how a mash tun works, you need a cursory understanding of how beers are made. Of course, beer primary of (and almost exclusively of) four ingredients: water, grains, hops, and yeast. Water is easy, as it comes from the tap. Hops are all the rage in beer, since they are so varied in their smells and flavors and produce wonderfully delicious tastes. Yeast is what gives us our alcohol, converting the sugars from the grains into alcohol, and turning wort into beer. The grains, however, are the definitive backbone of any beer, as they are what give the yeast the sugars to feed on, the color of the brew, and much of that flavor profile as well.
The grains, however, don’t just waive the white flag at boiling water and release their sugars. Extracting the sugars from malted grains (usually barley or wheat, but occasionally oats or corn) requires quite a few steps, time, and a very specific temperature range. Most entry-level home-brewers don’t have the time, equipment, or conceptualizing of how the grains release their sugars to get all of their fermentables from malted grains to simply use the grain for sugars. The process of extracting sugars from malted grains is called “mashing,” and terrified me mightily my first dozen batches. All of the really good homebrewers did it, and I knew I wanted to do it, but every time I started looking into it, I threw my hands up and said “my beer’s good as it is right now. Someday I’ll learn how to do it…but not today.”
An overwhelming majority of homebrewers start out using pre-extracted sugars for their fermentables, a process called “extract” brewing. These come in powder or liquid form, and are simply the sugars extracted from grains during mashing, but in a simple, add-to-you-boil-and-voila kind of way. You can make excellent beers from extract, especially if the extract is fresh. I’ve made beers that I loved from extract, and had others that were even better. It’s also considerably faster to brew extract batches, as they do not require the lengthy process of mashing your grains (which often takes about an hour and a half or so to complete).
So why not stay with extract? It’s faster, easier, and produces great beer. A number of reasons:
1. Extract costs about $4.00 a pound. Grains cost a quarter of that. It is considerably cheaper to mash your own grains in the long run, often cutting the cost of a batch in half, if not more. However, you do have to buy equipment to do so, which often offsets any savings for quite a few batches.
2. You have a great deal more control over your flavors, as you are controlling down to the smallest amount what sugars are in your beer. This allows you to do much more complicated beers, as well as beers that have to be mashed, as there is an ingredient that does not have an extract (like oatmeal or corn, as well as some other barley varieties that add body or color).
3. The most important reason: it’s awesome. It’s how beer was made for centuries before extract existed, and personally, I think it’s awesome if you can make great beer from the more complicated process.
So long story short: I spent the money today and got a mash tun, which is a piece of equipment that allows me to mash grains. It’s essentially a Gatorade cooler like you see at high school sporting events or in the NBA, modified to have a perforated mesh bottom that allows water through, but not the grain husks. It also has an industrial spigot instead of the push-down tap, which is way better for handling very hot water. To make a complex process as simple as possible, essentially you dump your grains into this cooler, pour hot water on at a specific temperature, and stir it all together. Most of the time, the water temperature needs to be held around 150-154 degrees Fahrenheit for about an hour. During this time, the water cooks the grains to a hot enough temperature to release their starchy sugars, but not too hot to destroy the enzymes that help convert those starches to sugar. It’s a happy medium. Too hot, no enzymes, and a beer that is very sweet. Too cool, no sugars, less alcohol. Both are not fun problems to have. The cooler works so well because it’s so insulated, losing temperature very slowly, and can keep that heat very even and controlled. After an hour, you run off the water in your mash tun into your kettle, running some fresh hot water over the top of your grains to get every last bit of fermentable sugar out. And voila! You’ll have your wort to brew from grains instead of extract from the store!
But now I have that equipment, and I’ll be putting it to use on that chocolate stout tonight. Hopefully it turns out and is as delicious as last time, since if so, it’ll be from a much higher degree of difficulty. And therefore that much more satisfying. Recipe and results to come later, but wish me luck…hopefully I’m not going to need it.
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