Home Brew Forum

Did a mini mash last night, I have friends that are very interested in homebrew but are obviously reluctant to buy all the equipment, so as way of an experiment i did a minmash with stuff thats in any kitchen (if it works out ok i'll show them how it can be done on a shoestring).

Recipe.
2.020 Kg Pale malt
0.360 Kg crystal Malt.

5 Litres of tescos cheap still water (from a 5 litre container).

All put into a grain bag dropped into a stock pot and then heated on the stove to 65 C, with peroidic warm ups for 60 mins.

Pulled the grain bag out and let it drip into another container.

Replaced into the stock pot with another 3 L of tescos water (from the second 5 L container). Mixed it up a bit and then again let it drain into the other container. Followed by a final rinse and drain with the remaining 2 L.

At this point i also added an extra 1L of water from the kettle becase the gravity was at 1060 even before the boil.

The whole lot was returned to the stove and boiled for 60 mins with the addition of hops at the start of the boil.

fuggles 16g
goldings 14g

a bit of protofloc at 15 mins remaining.

At flame out stock pot was placed in the kitchen sink with cold water, which was moved around the stock pot and replaced several times (also gently stirred the contents of the stockpot to aid in the cooling).

The whole lot was poured back into the 5L containers the water came from using a seive and a funnel (left plenty of head room). Each container got about 2-3g of windsor yeast.

Not sure if this will taste ok or if the large amount of break material getting into the fermenters will cause off flavours, but nothing ventured nothing gained. I'll report back what it turns out like

Edit:forgot to say that i got just over 6L of wort at 1060

Chris-x1 wrote:How did the full sized batch turn out you did a while ago ?

Excellent, hence why im trialling the mini mash with it (thanks for the helping me with the recipe )

Had the real thing again at the belfast beer fest and both me and swmbo, thought mine was better

Well done

Nice experiment will be very interested how it turns out.
A nice easy way to try out new hops, without doing 40 pints + in one go

Had a sly taste out of one of the containers, tastes great TBH just like the grown up sarah hughes only difference is that it has more hoppyness, probably because i calculated this as a two gallon batch but i only got just under one and a half gallon so the ibus are up on the orginal.

Chris-x1 wrote:Good result, have you convinced your friends to start brewing yet ?

Well so far one has bought a 100L ss brewery from brewzone

Im planning on having a bbq and beer drinking/making day probably next saturday where im hoping to get another few converts to at least try a mini-mash (a couple of french guys i know are keen to do the whole beer making thing, it'll feel good to convert a couple of fermented fruit juice drinkers ).

I owe You one for the plug Delboy!

BZ

Chris-x1 wrote:I bet Brewzone didn't think of advertising by running Minimash courses

Hi Chris! Glad to see You back!

I think SWMBO would beat Me with My own shoe if I said half a dozen newbies were popping round for a brewing session.

Might try this one myself, delboy - sounds excellent.

6L @1060 sound like pretty low efficiency for the recipe you quoted above (I work it out at about 52%)

I know that the tesco water has a lot of bicarbonate in it - I used to get about 65% efficiency when I used it and jumped up to 70% straight away when I started using filtered tap water.

Does mash efficiency drop off with a minimash?

Jymbo wrote:Might try this one myself, delboy - sounds excellent.

6L @1060 sound like pretty low efficiency for the recipe you quoted above (I work it out at about 52%)

I know that the tesco water has a lot of bicarbonate in it - I used to get about 65% efficiency when I used it and jumped up to 70% straight away when I started using filtered tap water.

Does mash efficiency drop off with a minimash?

Yeah it was pretty poor efficency, though i would guess efficency on the proper setup hovers about 65 % so im not exactly the efficency king anyway

I guess it was a number of issues really, i would have said that the grains were still chocka with sugars and could have done with a better sparging and i lost some as well when transferring from the stockpot to the containers through the seive and funnel setup (the flow was to great for the funnel )

When i do this again i'll definitely use more water to sparge the grains. And as you say the tescos water might not be up to snuff so i'll probably just use tap water like you suggest.