EdmontonBoil
Member
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2022
- Messages
- 20
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- 7
I'm in my first six months of brewing all grain and tried to tackle a step mash for the first time a couple days ago, making hefeweizen. It didn't go as planned, I ended up at too low of a temp, and I tried to jerry-rig a solution to activate the alpha amylase: I'd like to know whether people think any part of what I made up on the fly will work.
I was initially trying to do a protein rest around 130. I ended up hovering around 138, trying to cool it down for the entirety of the protein rest--and only got down to about 134 by the end. I then raised the temperature by decocting some of the wort, but instead of hitting my target temp of 152, I only raised the temperature to 142. I was brewing while in the middle of a zoom meeting and couldn't step away to attend to the situation, so it sat at this lower temperature for about 45 minutes--which should have activated the beta amylase, but is definitely too low for alpha, as far as I know. I didn't want to decoct again at this point in time (I didn't actually want the brew to last all day), so I decided to take a gamble, drain the wort, batch sparge at a higher temperature, and hold it there for another 20 minutes or so (at about 158 degrees), in the hopes of activating the alpha amylase. Meanwhile, I started to heat the first half of the wort, but as I went through the 155-170 range I slowed down the heating process and again held it there for about 20 minutes in the event that there were enzymes in the wort itself that could work to produce some shorter sugars for the yeast. (Ok -- a second decoction here probably wouldn't have taken any longer, but I was thinking on the fly.)
The sparge pulled way more sugar out of the grist than I expected--only about ten points below the initial mash--so something seemed to be happening. But my question is: is there any way that either the extended sparge or the slow heating of the wort will do anything new to activate alpha amylase that wasn't accomplished in the initial mash?
So far, the fermentation isn't kicking in very quickly, so that might be an indication that I don't have very fermentable sugars in my wort. ...it also might mean that recycling the yeast from my brother's brew last week isn't actually working like I thought it would.
I was initially trying to do a protein rest around 130. I ended up hovering around 138, trying to cool it down for the entirety of the protein rest--and only got down to about 134 by the end. I then raised the temperature by decocting some of the wort, but instead of hitting my target temp of 152, I only raised the temperature to 142. I was brewing while in the middle of a zoom meeting and couldn't step away to attend to the situation, so it sat at this lower temperature for about 45 minutes--which should have activated the beta amylase, but is definitely too low for alpha, as far as I know. I didn't want to decoct again at this point in time (I didn't actually want the brew to last all day), so I decided to take a gamble, drain the wort, batch sparge at a higher temperature, and hold it there for another 20 minutes or so (at about 158 degrees), in the hopes of activating the alpha amylase. Meanwhile, I started to heat the first half of the wort, but as I went through the 155-170 range I slowed down the heating process and again held it there for about 20 minutes in the event that there were enzymes in the wort itself that could work to produce some shorter sugars for the yeast. (Ok -- a second decoction here probably wouldn't have taken any longer, but I was thinking on the fly.)
The sparge pulled way more sugar out of the grist than I expected--only about ten points below the initial mash--so something seemed to be happening. But my question is: is there any way that either the extended sparge or the slow heating of the wort will do anything new to activate alpha amylase that wasn't accomplished in the initial mash?
So far, the fermentation isn't kicking in very quickly, so that might be an indication that I don't have very fermentable sugars in my wort. ...it also might mean that recycling the yeast from my brother's brew last week isn't actually working like I thought it would.