Mash temp for mild?

[johnmac]

Anyway, having now finished drinking the hot-mashed mild, I'm convinced that that's the way to make mild. It was like the best I ever had in The Black Country.

[prodigal2]

Great news, and thanks for posting that bit of information. I think once I get round to doing a mild I shall use this information wisely

[David Edge]

Palmer mentions that malto dextrin powder isn't sweet though, assuming he is basing this on having tasted it doesn't that suggest that Geop Coopers theory is incorrect ?

Chomsky was right. Human language has the possibility of unique utterance. I don't think anyone has ever put together a sentence containing the words "Geoff Cooper" and "incorrect" before (at least without the word "not" in there as well). As the brewing gods go he's up there with Palmer and he eats Papazians for breakfast.

One of his salient features is a certain intellectual rigour and I think he would respond along the lines of: "The original stateent disputed was 'all dextrins are not sweet'. That encompasses chains of glucose units from maltotetraose (four glucose units) to 20 000 units. Now, what are the length of dextrin chains in maltodextrin powder?"

[David Edge]

From your last sentence I gather that maltodextrin doesn't contain the full range of dextrins found in beer?

Haven't the foggiest idea. But I don't know why reacting maize with industrial acids would produce the same spectrum of dextrins that mashing malted barley in the presence of amylases would.

A speculative thought is that the germinating barleycorn plant is trying to make maltose and indeed monosaccharides for food thus you'd expect the distribution of chain lengths to be bunched towards the left when the process is interrupted at end of mash. On the other hand in industrial dextrin manufacture, short polymers are a waste product (if you're trying to make a product that isn't sweet) and you'd expect the factory to tweak the process to produce as few as possible.

[Aleman]

From your last sentence I gather that maltodextrin doesn't contain the full range of dextrins found in beer?

The process is somewhat different. Maltodextrin tend to contain pretty much the bigger chain polysaccharides (although not as long as starch ), the dextrins found in beer (produced via the amylase complex) are shorter chained and 'branched' this is because one of the amylase enzymes (I can't remember which and ATM can't be bothered to look it up ) works from the ends of the chain snipping of maltose molecules, but stops when it hits a 1-4 or 1-6 link, the other breaks the chains in the middle exposing the ends of these chains for the other enzyme to work on. IIRC it is blocked by 1-6 bonds. in this way you end up with Maltotriose, 3 maltose units' (possibly fermentable by some yeast strains) and maltotetrose, 4 maltose units, these are the 'dextrins' that are mostly responsible for the 'perceived' sweetness of dextrins. Of course there are dextrins with 5,6,7,8,9 etc maltose units, but these are primarily concerned with providing some of the mouth feel and body in the beer, the rest coming from proteins.

HTH

[Aleman]

While not wishing to disagree with David, there are a few things that I feel should be considered important when brewing a mild. While I love the idea of not brewing by numbers, sometimes its important to consider them and change our techniques if we want to do so.

First of I will say that My historical mild was hot mashed (Completely by accident) at 68C and doughed in much higher than that, and it is a good beer (Even Geoff Copper said it was a nice mild ) However it is well underattenuated and if I hadn't intentionally been brewing that style of mild I would have made some changes.

A quaffing mild is one of the hardest beer styles to brew successfully, and I've gone on about this ad nauseam on UK homebrew. Personally I consider a low gravity well balanced milds one of the hardest beers to brew well, much harder IMNSHO that a Pilsner. The difficulty is to get the right amount of flavour in the beer while not having it cloying sweet and thick or over bittered. The key is to get all the flavours in balance, and this is where the numbers come in and assist you.

Personally my mild recipes contain Pale and Mild malts, with Crystal for colour (I'm liking the effect of the Light 70EBC Crystal, darkening without the overpowering crystal cloyness), generally aiming for 1.038 and around 28-30IBU, mashing them hot at 67-68C so that I've got lots of residual sweetness, and then adding boring old white sugar (5-10%) to thin the beer down and provide a bit of dryness balancing that sweetness and allowing the hop bitterness to just start to make its presence known.

Another alternative is to mash cooler (64C), use more crystal, and no sugar but this is a much harder and less predictable method to achieving a balanced beer. It may well still be a nice beer, but not what I had intended to brew.

[David Edge]

one of the amylase enzymes (I can't remember which ... works from the ends of the chain snipping of maltose molecules,

I remember Alpha and Beta not from Axe and Bite (Papazian), but from my own modification Axe and niBBle. So Beta is the once that niBBles from the ends.

[David Edge]

and this is where the numbers come in and assist you.

100% agreement. Yes the numbers assist. What gets me ranting is Captain Prune who says "My beer is 149.3854 IBUs" on the basis of the hops added to the copper.

Bxlloo (anag). Prune put 200 grams of hops in his historical IPA. That predicts say 150 IBUs given a whole load of assumptions Captain Prune doesn't understand and that almost certainly don't apply (and in any case how do you model alpha acid degradation between hop field and your fridge?). I agree that an alpha acid calculation is the best way to get a first stab at a recipe and the brewing by numbers rant doesn't apply to that scenario. It does apply to when Prune's beer is too bitter - or isn't bitter enough - and he doesn't just turn the hops up or down using his tastebuds and braincells. Neither does Prune get Brewlab to measure the bitterness and then adjust his utilisation figure.

No Prune posts to a newsgroup wailing about the inadequacies of the sums rather than getting together with other brewers and developing his tasting skills. As I've said before, I had a lovely attempt at Landlord presented to me by a brewer who said "It's useless it is 76.4653 IBUs" when it was more like Landlord than Landlord on the palate. Similarly, I've helped (I trust) two brewers recently who both complained of a nasty aftertaste in their beer. Examination of the beers revealed the 'nasty aftertaste' to be bitterness. It's at that point that switching off the computer and staggering blinking out into the light to meet others helps!

So use the numbers for a start - but then switch on your braincells and taste buds (not you Tony, brewers in general). I certainly recalculate any recipe I pick up using my plant performance before I brew it. I'm not a hippy or a homoeopath!

The decent article on making mild (not mine) has just been made public by the CBA (it's over a year old) and it's here: http://craftbrewing.org.uk/bcpdf/BC6-3_sep2006.pdf

cheers!

(Nice to be talking about beer again).

d.