mashing

[swheatbeer]

Hi all,

Has anyone ever tried a slow cooker for the mash. I live in a very small flat and can only do small batched - 10l or so. Would a slow cooker on low be good for the mash. I havent room for a mash tun

[floydmeddler]

You could always do a mini mash using a stockpot in your oven.

[mac]

Hi all,

Has anyone ever tried a slow cooker for the mash. I live in a very small flat and can only do small batched - 10l or so. Would a slow cooker on low be good for the mash. I havent room for a mash tun

Give the slow cooker to your local charity shop. While you are down there, Pick up a cheap cooler box to use as a mash tun, preferably from the charity shop, do the brew, take the cooler box back to the charity shop and complain that someone has left it full of grains. While you are there, buy your slow cooker back for £1.00. They should have had it electrically tested and cleaned by now. Repeat this every brew day and not only will you have enough room, but you'll never have to clean your mash tun or slow cooker again

On a more serious note. I live in a flat and I'm restricted by space. My 3 tier system takes up just 1.5m x 0.5m. half a metre by half a metre on the kitchen worktop half a metre by half a metre on a kitchen chair and half a metre by half a metre on the floor in front of the chair, You'll need the same area whatever you use.

There is no need to heat the mash, you just need to keep it at about 65 to 70 degrees. If you are aiming for an exact fine tuned end product, you'll need to be precise with measurements and temperatures.
If you want to start off with 10l of regular all grain beer, just put 2kg of pale malt into a container with a tap on. The tap will need some kind of filter on the inside to keep the grains in the container. pour in 5 litres of water about 65-70 deg c, wrap in a load of towels or a sleeping bag or all your winter clothes and let it soak for an hour or 2.
slowly drain it off while adding another 5 litres of 65-70 water.
boil what you have collected for a hour and a half with 25g of hops, top up to 10 ;itres with boiled water from the kitchen kettle and leave it to cool.

when cooled, sprinkle half a pack of yeast on top and leave for a week with a lid half tight.

2kg of Maris otter with 25g of Goldings hops in 10L of water should give you 30 IBU of bitterness, an original gravity of 1.045, a finished gravity of 1.006 and 5% alcohol

[swheatbeer]

thanks. think I will try both over the next week or so.

would still be interested to know if anyone has had sucess with a slow cooker. I was thinking of picking one up for cooking as they are as cheap as a tenner and if I could mash in them it would be good to know

[mac]

The trouble with a slow cooker is, you don't have a tap at the base of the pot to drain off the liquid. And you would need one big enough to take 5 litres of water plus your grains. You don't want to cook the grains because this will bring out some of the bad tastes. You just want to soak and wash the sugar out of them.
Have a look at Jim's 'Technique' tab at the top of the page and follow the mash and sparge tabs. Simplicity.

[Hogarth]

The problem with doing smaller mashes is that they lose their heat more quickly. From that point of view a slow cooker isn't such a bad idea. I haven't tried it, but I've done a mini-mash in a stockpot in the gas oven on the 'slow cooking' setting. It stayed at exactly 65°C for over an hour.

As Mac says, though, you won't be able to sparge in your slow cooker. You'll have to transfer the mash to another vessel. I tipped mine into a saucepan fitted with a tap and a false bottom made from a dinner plate.

[mac]

Hi all,

Has anyone ever tried a slow cooker for the mash. I live in a very small flat and can only do small batched - 10l or so. Would a slow cooker on low be good for the mash. I havent room for a mash tun

How's this for limited brewing space
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=23180#p258368

[basswulf]

Has anyone ever tried a slow cooker for the mash. I live in a very small flat and can only do small batched - 10l or so. Would a slow cooker on low be good for the mash. I havent room for a mash tun

I know this is an old thread but I'm wondering if you, or anyone else, has put this idea into practice? I've been eyeing up BIAB techniques, which I think could work well combined with a slow cooker. Mine has about a 4l capacity and three settings, high, low and auto. Ignoring auto (which, as far as I understand it, uses some kind of timer to switch from high to low), the temperatures generated seem to be 75ºC and 55ºC respectively but the set up also has good insulation and heat loss is fairly slow. It would need some monitoring but I reckon I could maintain a steady temperature round about 65ºC for an hour or so to achieve a mash. I could then transfer the grain bag to my stockpot to squeeze and rinse (the sparging stage) before pouring in the wort from the slow cooker, perhaps topping up with a bit more water and boiling to sterilise and introduce hop bittering and flavouring.

I appreciate that I would only be producing a fairly small volume of beer in each batch but that is ideal for my purposes because I want to experiment with recipes and not end up with too many bottles to drink before I start the next one. I was looking at primary fermentation in a couple of 5l water bottles, with a sealed lid and blow-off hose on each to allow for yeast expansion. I would look to have about 7l of beer to bottle (ie. about 12 pints or 14-15 500ml bottles) but with a bit more liquid shared between them to allow for gravity testing towards the end of the initial fermentation.

I obviously need to do some calculations to figure out how to scale the recipes down and I expect there would be a certain amount of trial and error to hit the target initial gravity (can I tweak that with DME / brewing sugar / extra water if my wort turns out high or low?) but does it sound feasible. I want to experiment with recipes without making an investment in extra equipment at this stage; once I've identified some recipes that work well for my tastes, I'd then consider the options to scaling back up to a more regular volume of production.

Advice welcome (if you feel impelled to be a nay-sayer, I don't mind as long as you can explain why and help me build my understanding).

Ta.

Wulf

[danbrew]

I appreciate your approach as I have been through this whole thought process myself... But I'm affraid I'd be a bit of a nay-sayer as you put it.... You're defeating part of the object of the BIAB system because it is a single vessel approach where you mash and boil in the same vessel. What is the reason you don't want to mash in the stock pot?

I rejected the slow cooker approach a while ago for a couple of reasons, I couldn't find a slow cooker big enough, you'll need to stir regularly to maintain heat distribution in the mash, the slow cooker thermostat isn't accurate so you need an additional temperature measure/ switch...

[basswulf]

I'm thinking that the slow cooker will be easier to maintain at a constant temperature than my stock pot. While it would be ideal if it had a reliable way of setting the exact temperature, the observed parameters bracket the target temperature fairly closely (I haven't checked to see what temperatures the lowest two or three settings on my hob settle at for a pot of liquid). Also, I'll need somewhere to lift the grain bag too, and (with a small scale set up) it will be easy to put it in the clean stock pot, rinse it through and then dump it in the sink once I don't need it for the wort any more. Otherwise (if I understand the process correctly), I'd need to lift the bag out of the water in the stockpot and then squeeze it out while holding it above the pot.

Plus, I like using my slow cooker. I recently discovered that it makes a great water bath for creating delicious curds (lemon and other flavours) and I'm just intrigued to see if it can work in making beer too.

Thanks for the response though.

Wulf

[dave-o]

Temperature control on a slow cooker will be a nightmare, and then you'll have to seive it out of course.

I'd look at getting a cheap boiler on Ebay and doing BIAB. You only need a boiler and a FV for that - not much space taken up.

[Jim]

One thing to bear in mind is that a successful mash tun does NOT need to be heated.

By far the best strategy imo is to start the mash at the correct temperature then insulate it - the grains are pretty good at retaining the heat to start with, and if you have an old quilt to wrap around whatever you use as mash tun (or use a picnic cooler as suggested above) you'll have no significant temperature drop over a couple of hours.

If you try to keep the mash warm with heaters, you get hot spots and cool spots in different parts of the mash and it's just bad news. The only reliable way to use heating for a mash is with a RIMS or HERMS system (google if you don't know what those are, but you don't want to do that unless you enjoy excessive amounts of DIY!).

[basswulf]

So if I get the water a little hotter than my intended strike temperature, then wrap it well, I won't need to top up the temperature? Yes, I suppose that does seem simpler still.

I've got an old picnic cooler, so perhaps my next step should be to see if the stockpot fits in there.

Cheers,

Wulf

[basswulf]

If you try to keep the mash warm with heaters, you get hot spots and cool spots in different parts of the mash and it's just bad news. The only reliable way to use heating for a mash is with a RIMS or HERMS system (google if you don't know what those are, but you don't want to do that unless you enjoy excessive amounts of DIY!).

Oh... and as a ps, I see what you mean about an excessive amount of DIY!

Wulf

[Befuddler]

so perhaps my next step should be to see if the stockpot fits in there.

Eh?

I think you may have misunderstood slightly.. You don't put a pot in the cooler, you fill the cooler with grains/water and use that as your mash tun!