Reiterated Mash - Planning in Action

Today was our reiterated mashing day for our "Sissy" Kaffir Lime Imperial Lager. For all of the details on the story behind the reiterated mashing technique, please check out my previous post, I don't feel like going over it again.

This morning I started heating 10 gallons of water up at 6:30am. As planned, we split the grain bill up into two batches. The first was 15.2 lbs and the second was 16.8 lbs. There was 5lbs of brown rice that was cooked the night before and added to each of the mashes.

We struck the first mash and the temp was at 145, lower than the 150 we had targeted for this mash. We ran off two gallons into the second mash and added 2 gallons of water at 162 to get us up to the desired 150f. We held that mash at that temp for 20 min.

After the 20 min, we ran our first mash off into the second mash. For this we used a cooler that was the same size as the mash tun. After running off, we were well below the desired 145, so we pulled off about 1/3 of the mash and heated it to a boil on a separate burner (this is a decoction of sorts). After adding this back to the second mash, we had a temp that was little higher than we wanted, 151, but we were good with that as it was going to loose some temp over the hour hold. In the end, the first runnings were 13 brix or about 1.056 for the first mash.

Now in a slight deviation from the original reiterated mashing technique, we decided that we were going to try to utilize as much of the sugars on the grain as possible. The plan was to sparge the first mashing and keep that runoff for sparging the second mash. This second running on the first mash was 5 gallons at 168 and yielded 7.25 brix (1.028G).

While we waited for the first mash to finish it's 60min hold, we cleaned the grains out of the mash tun in preparation for the second mash.

Once the hold was done on the second mash, we moved the grains from the cooler into the mash tun where we were added boiling water to acheve 168f for mashout. Once at mashout, we setup for a fly sparge using the sparge runoff from the first mash. The first running from the second mash yeilded 18.25 brix (1.074G).

We wound up with a bit more volume than we had planned on so we seporated the wort into two brew pots for increased evaporation. After about an hour of boiling, we added them to the same brew pot and started a normal brew adding our bittering hops of 2 oz UK Goldings for 45min. The aroma hops were UK Goldings as well of 1 oz for 25min.

Once the wort was cool, we decided to use Beano pills as a way of getting rid of some of residual sugars by turning them into fermetable sugars The decision to do this was in light of a BA post that I did and a BYO article here. According to what we had seen, adding 4 pills per 5 gal would turn the residual sugars into fermentables, giving you a beer that has a lower carbohydrate level and, in our case, a crisp dry finish like you get in a Japanese Lager.

We crushed up 8 Beano pills and added them to the 10 gal cooled wort.

In preparation for a big beer, we did aerated the beer thoroughly and made a mini yeast culture for future introduction into the beer. We will use this if the fermentation slows down as a way to kick start the process.

Ah, well I think that's it. In this end this brew weighed in at 1.072 which was less than the 1.073 the recipe should have given us. I need to sleep on this whole "reiterated mashing" before I have a definitive conclusion on it's application. While we did deviate from the path in some ways, we also did something that would hopefully have led to a greater utilization of our grains. I am not sure if we got any more out of our grains than we would of doing anything else, but it was an interesting process and fun to try something new.

Reiterated Mashing

So in December of this past year when my BYO came, I saw an article by Chris Colby about this new technique for brewing high gravity beers. While I was not able to find an online version of the article, you can order it from BYO here or you can hear a really informative interview with James from Basic Brewing Radio here (November 22, 2007) on it.

Reading the article really gave me a lot to think about. Three things come to mind:

1) Is this worth all the work?
2) what's the benefit?
3) If this is some magic way to maximize your grain bill, why not do it all the time?

Well after listening to James' interview and reading a bunch of forum threads on it (here, here and here), I came up with some answers to these questions:

1) Making a big beer is always one of several things, work, time or money.
2) The benefit is being able to make a big beer with a normal mash tun and with out having to boil down 20 gallons of wort
3) No magic, just a way to deal with a 40lb grain bill on a 12 gallon mash tun and a 15gal brew kettle

So after some reading and a meeting with Nick, we decided to take the plunge and we are going to brew a Kaffir Lime Imperial Lager. Here is the recipe:


Recipe Specifications
--------------------------
Batch Size: 10.50 gal
Boil Size: 11.70 gal
Estimated OG: 1.080 SG
Estimated Color: 3.9 SRM
Estimated IBU: 15.7 IBU
Brewhouse Efficiency: 60.0 %
Boil Time: 45 Minutes

Ingredients:
------------
Amount Item Type % or IBU
30.00 lb Pilsner (2 Row) UK (1.0 SRM) Grain 75.0 %
8.00 lb Rice, Flaked (1.0 SRM) Grain 20.0 %
2.00 lb Pale Malt (6 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 5.0 %
3.00 oz Saaz [4.00%] (45 min) Hops 15.7 IBU
Munich Lager #2308 (reused from Samuel Jackson)

Now there are a few things going on here that I need to explain. First off the rice. While flaked rice (rice that is pregelatinized) is the recommended method of using rice as an adjunct, we are going to be using plain white rice because of the lack of availability of flaked rice. So there will be a 1/2 hr rice prep that will either take place the night before or the day of brewing.

With that said, we are going to make our variation on a "reiterated mash":

Reiterated Mashing (our take)

1. 20lbs added to mash tun
2. Strike 10 gal of water at 162 for a grain bed temp of 150
3. Let sit for 20 min
4. Heat up additional 5 gallons water to sparge first 20lbs of grain
5. Runoff into brew kettle - Heat wort up (if necessary)
6. Strike wort from kettle to second 20lbs of grain (in second cooler)with 140-145f grain bed target temp - Rest for 1hr stiring every 10min
7. (in the meantime) Batch sparge 5 gallons of sparge water that was heated up, runoff into second brew pot - Heat up to 140f and hold
8. Empty first 20lbs of grain from mash tun
9. After the hour is up, dump the second 20lbs of grain from second cooler into mash tun along with 2.5 gal of water at 192f for mash out temp - let stand for 10 min.
10. Runoff into brew kettle
11. Use the 5 gallons that was sparged from the first 20lbs to fly sparge the second 20lbs in the mash tun
12. Brew!

From all the reading and listening I did, this process should be about 3hrs on it's own. There are some basic "all grain brewing" aspects of this that are assumed such as recirculation. With that said, there will be minimal to no recirculation before the last runoff because the wort is going into more grain.

After the wort is in the kettle (we are shooting for 11.7gal preboil volume) we will commence with a normal brew day only with a 45min boil to ensure the lightness of the brew.

The kaffir lime is going to be introduced in the secondary. The preparation is for the leaves only. Nick is in charge of this and he is freezing the leaves (20 for a 10.5 gallon batch) and then chopping them up and boiling them. This will make a kaffir lime leaf concentrate and that is what we will introduce to the secondary. It's a pretty interesting idea.

So that's the plan. We are open to feed back as it sounds like there have not been a lot of people out there that have used this approach. I hope that I was able to articulate the technique in a way that makes sense (to those of us above the Mason Dixon line anyway, MNB I am mostly concerned for you as this is pretty confusing).

Cheers!

PS - I am going to take plenty of pictures and try to make a really comprehensive overview of how we are doing this.