24hr lagtime between sparge and boil

I am having trouble trying to fit in 6 hr brew days, since it works best to start after kids are in bed. I came up with the idea of splitting my brew day into two separate evenings. This would normally leave a 24hr lag time between sparge and beginning the boil. I tried it this weekend and found a thin white layer on top of the wort when I took the lid off the kettle 24 hrs later. I had transferred from the MLT into the kettle during sparge, then put the lid on the kettle and let it sit out 24 hrs.

Should I be worried about off tastes? Or since I'm still boiling will I kill off anything which could cause problems?

Why are they 6 hours? I would try to pin down what is taking longer than it should before splitting brew days.

geoffey said:

I am having trouble trying to fit in 6 hr brew days, since it works best to start after kids are in bed. I came up with the idea of splitting my brew day into two separate evenings. This would normally leave a 24hr lag time between sparge and beginning the boil. I tried it this weekend and found a thin white layer on top of the wort when I took the lid off the kettle 24 hrs later. I had transferred from the MLT into the kettle during sparge, then put the lid on the kettle and let it sit out 24 hrs.

Should I be worried about off tastes? Or since I'm still boiling will I kill off anything which could cause problems?

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Grain is full of lactobacillus. While you will kill it in the boil, any souring that already occurred won't go away.

Ideally, you could try bringing the wort up to a boil quickly and then cooling it and placing it in a fridge until you could do the whole boil.

Or try an overnight mash, instead of leaving sweet wort out at room temperature all night.

Just like with food, you don't leave it sit out at room temperature all night, you probably won't want to do that with unboiled wort either.

I did this recently with good results. I finished sparging at night and boiled next morning, though. I also heated the wort in the kettle to 170F to kill bugs before leaving. There is no sourness this way, and the 170F heat will stop conversion and lock in your fermentability.

Interesting idea. I've noticed wild nasties are enzymatic in nature the way they break things down.

Well I boiled last night and after cooling I tasted the wort and couldn't detect any sourness. So maybe ill be ok. Not sure if ill try this again unless I'm doing the boil first thing in the morning. I really don't have space in the fridge for 10 gallons of wort. I should have at least boiled it for a few minutes, that was kind of stupid of me in hind sight.

I just finished a batch I started this saturday but had to stop post sparge due to events out of my control. Only boiled this evening after work and pitched about 30 mins ago so I guess I'll find out the hard way, I hope I don't have to dump it, but time will tell, fingers crossed.

From my experience when I prepared bacterial growth medium from powder (it's not too far off from wort really) and let it sit overnight at room temperature there are good chances of something growing in it already the next day. Since the wort is more acidic though and has been "produced" at fairly high temperatures the outcome might be slightly in your favor, even better when chilled overnight. Good luck and please let us know how it turned out!

Are you opposed to mini-mashing? Using DME can shave off 1-2 hrs easily. Even though I do all grain now, some of my favorite beers were made with extract.

Attempted an overnight mash late last night with the expectation of boiling this morning. Some things popped up and I didn't get back to the mash tun until a few hours ago. The temp had only dropped 14 degrees to 138F so I was hopeful and started warming sparge water.

The first runnings had a funky odor to them and umm... yeah, my mouth is still puckering from a quick taste of the wort. All well.

How quick does lacto reproduce? Obviously it's not a problem for 1h mashes, what's the maximum period you can go before they impact flavors?
Would there be any real aseptic advantage to hopping the mash?

Off to pressure wash my tongue.

Bottled mine yesterday, and even with the 48hr lag it still tastes great at bottling, hope it just gets better. Maybe a bit thin but I think that's more to do with me screwing my mash temps but not so much it ruined the FG test

Unfortunately, I have a lot of experience with this and can offer my anecdotal observations (in fact, i dealt with this issue this AM). Yes, the brewing process can be split up, but that is never the ideal. However, see gordon Strong's recent book; he talks about this. Temperature has a lot to do with this and you can get away wioth more in cold weather than warm. I have found that mashing out helps preserve the mash for up to 6 to 8 hours (temp dependent) if you cannot sparge right away. Pasteurizing wort at 180 will generally buy you 10 hours. i find darker grists fair better than paler ones. If the wort or mash has picked up sour notes, and likely some vegetal as well (tomatoes, cabbage, etc.), these will often boil out if you catch it quickly. Also, check pH. You will find notable drop due to lactobacillus and you can often correct this with the addition of NaH2CO3. Warning! Much better to add the bicarb before you get to boil, or you will have the mother of all boil overs! I take pre-boil pH measurments and try to correct to about 5.6. The bicarb will also take away the sour/tart flavor by neutralizing the acid.

Hope that helps.

When in doubt, make it a spice beer!

Thanks for all the responses. I believe I got lucky this time. The beer has so far turned out better than expected at each step. It's now carbonating. I have tasted no sour notes.

If I were to do this again I would definitely pasteurize and not leave it for more than 8 hours unless I had the means to cool it.

One other thought might be to use the "no cool" method that seems to be popular in Australia, but apply it post sparge rather than post boil.

Jdslep said:

I did this recently with good results. I finished sparging at night and boiled next morning, though. I also heated the wort in the kettle to 170F to kill bugs before leaving. There is no sourness this way, and the 170F heat will stop conversion and lock in your fermentability.

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I also have done this on a few occasions, but what i did was like Yooper said.
I mashed sparged and got the wort ta boil and then covered until the morning with a light American lager that I was planning on boiling for 90 minutes and it turned out really well. But I am with Yooper in that it would definitely need to be boiled to kill any nasties that set in.

I break my brewing up in to multiple days.

1. Set the equipment up, one day
   
2. Brew the beer, day two
   
3. Put the equipment away, day three
   
4. Keg and clean up, day four

It just make life so much easier and then brewing ifun and not a chore.

DPB