As a simple proof of concept my friend and I attempted to make a mostly corn beer. The idea of this beer was to use simple cheap ingredients to get the OG has high as possible and try to produce a beer with maximum ABV (BeerSmith said we could get upwards of 20%). We were not trying to create a good tasting beer but rather simply test our skills. The recipe we decided is as follows for what was supposed to be a 1 gallon batch.
7 lbs of flaked corn
.5 lbs honey malt
Mash at 153 fro 75 minutes in 10.6 qts of water.
This is where we ran into trouble. We attempted to try to brew it as a BIAB method. As there was a large amount of grain for only a small amount of water we decided to split the grain into two bags. At about 45 minutes we noticed that the water was not really getting any change in color and when taking a refractometer reading we measured 0 brix. Also both bags seemed to become has hard as rocks. In hopes of saving the experiment we decided to empty the the bags in hopes of doing a more traditional mash. It is at this point we went from bad to worse. It seems that very little of the water had been absorbed very little water and when all the grain was released it made up for lost time. We want from having something that looked like wort to home-style grits in no time. The mash was so think it was unusable. It was this time that we decided to call it a failed experiment and went and poured ourselves one of our successful homebrews and called it a day.
Sorry for the long post but i was wondering if anyone had any ideas of what we could have done differently to avoid having to scrap the whole thing.
Luckily the yeast was never pitched so now i have a wyeast saison 3711 and WLP099 Super High Gravity Ale Yeast to play around with
7 lbs of flaked corn
.5 lbs honey malt
Mash at 153 fro 75 minutes in 10.6 qts of water.
This is where we ran into trouble. We attempted to try to brew it as a BIAB method. As there was a large amount of grain for only a small amount of water we decided to split the grain into two bags. At about 45 minutes we noticed that the water was not really getting any change in color and when taking a refractometer reading we measured 0 brix. Also both bags seemed to become has hard as rocks. In hopes of saving the experiment we decided to empty the the bags in hopes of doing a more traditional mash. It is at this point we went from bad to worse. It seems that very little of the water had been absorbed very little water and when all the grain was released it made up for lost time. We want from having something that looked like wort to home-style grits in no time. The mash was so think it was unusable. It was this time that we decided to call it a failed experiment and went and poured ourselves one of our successful homebrews and called it a day.
Sorry for the long post but i was wondering if anyone had any ideas of what we could have done differently to avoid having to scrap the whole thing.
Luckily the yeast was never pitched so now i have a wyeast saison 3711 and WLP099 Super High Gravity Ale Yeast to play around with