• PartialMash
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Partial Mash: #2

If you have seen my first attempt at the PartialMash/1 page and haven't tried it before, hopefully you will be tempted to give it a go. After that attempt I decided that I should up the target boil volume to 15 litres which is about the practical maxium I could safely handle in my 19 litre pot.

There are some pictures further down but first I go into some recipe calculations, just skip this if your brain starts to ache. You will also see that the brew day deviated from my plans for several reasons and you might be interested to know what happened and also that it didn't ruin my brew (yes I have tasted it - beautiful!).

I didn't have a ready made recipe so I took this pilsner recipe and scaled up the grain to reach my target volume (in theory anyway). I used a spreadsheet (confirmed with qbrew) and the working was basically as follows:

1. John Palmer states that when all is considered, a reasonable set of mash parameters (I converted from US units) is:
   1. 3 litres/kg of grain
   2. Mash at 65-68°C. I lost about 7.5°C when using 3 litres/kg on my first mash.
   3. pH 5.3

2. My plan was to use a batch sparge where basically half the wort comes from the first runoff and the other half from the batch sparge (see GettingStarted for batch sparge links).

3. I also know that from my first mash that the grain soaked up about 600 ml water for each kg of grain. If you don't account for this you won't hit your target volume.
4. I plugged in my grain bill then used DME to make up the OG.

To cut a long story short, I went down to my LHBS with a shopping list of grain to buy. The dude there chucked it all in together assuming it was the right quantity for my recipe but I had just come up with some nominal quantities and was planning to fine tune the numbers when I got home (Saturday arvo and the LHBS closing soon). Looks like I now had my recipe whether I liked it or not. The reciped ended up:

I bought some saflager but I noticed some crap from the bottom of a previous batch was trying to escape from the fridge so I thought I would liberate it (lager yeast from a gold rush pils kit). I made a 1 litre starter the day before.

Inside the mashtun was something that I hoped would let the wort out and keep the grain in.

Well in reality it din't let much wort out. Part way through draining the mash water I decided to pull the scrubby out of the SS screen (you try that with a beer glass in one hand!). That made absolutely no difference so I dumped it altogether and chucked everything into the colander.

After that and sparging with a glass jug it was back to business as usual with the boil. Here is a lesson: plans can totally screw up but it doesn't have to mean your brew is stuffed.

I have no intention of using this mash setup again. It could be made to work (it was more my technique than anything) but the Esky I used on the next attempt seems to work for me.