A funny thing happened at the barber shop

[youreds91]

Whilst having my hair cut a few weeks back, I mentioned my brewing to the barber to which he responded "She's into that, but she does it properly, not from a kit". Thinking he was on about his missus I said "Who, your missus?", "No" he replied, "her" gesturing in the direction of his female barbering assistant.

She'd just finished doing her last punters hair & with me being the last one in the shop we went into a conversation about mashing, sparging etc. whilst my barber's eyes started to glaze over.

Anyway, during subsequent trips we've being discussing her brewing which isn't going too well, it seems her husband is reading too much stuff on the net & getting confused. They'd had a stuck mash, which I told her was no cause for major concern, they'd also introduced some metal mesh into the mash tun to help prevent the stuck mash next time, causing a brew with a metallic taste.

Anyway, I digress, she told me they had to chuck the last brew away as it was just not right. As she cut I went through the process with her. It seems they got the definition of re-circulating wrong. Instead of re-circulating the first 3 jugfuls of wort during sparging, they had re-circulated the whole lot through the grain 3 times

As we all know brewing is very forgiving, but what damage would this have done?

CD

[mysterio]

No damage whatsoever, its possible that this is the cause of their stuck mash if they ran off too quickly and compacted the grain bed. Probably the wort would have cooled down a bit during this time which wont have helped the lautering.

Stuck mash can easily be remedied, usually by a better manifold design and making sure the sparge water temperature is the right temp.

[lukesharpe]

Damn, she's married!

[jubby]

I wouldn't have thought that recirculating the mash like that would be a problem, It just means you should have nice clear wort into the boiler. However, it may have caused the stuck mash if the run off from the mash tun was too fast, as it would compact the grain bed.

Edit. mysterio got there first.

[youreds91]

No damage whatsoever, its possible that this is the cause of their stuck mash if they ran off too quickly and compacted the grain bed. Probably the wort would have cooled down a bit during this time which wont have helped the lautering.

Stuck mash can easily be remedied, usually by a better manifold design and making sure the sparge water temperature is the right temp.

She's using a Hop & Grape converted coolbox, so shouldn't have any bother.
I've sent her the link to Chris/Daab's youtube all grain vid & said do it like that, but without the pump. Also sent her the step by step batch spage instructions posted here a while back.

[Philipek]

I seem to remember reading somewhere about a guy who got 98 percent efficiency by doing just that, recirculating the first runnings and doing the same with the sparge water.

[Eric]

Post by lukesharpe on Wed Sep 02, 2009 3:53 pm
Damn, she's married!

Didn't think that stopped you before?

[Jim]

Lately I've been recirculating the whole first runnings a couple of times - it gets you a very clear run off. It certainly slows the sparge down, but not to any great extent.

Probably the crush of her grain is a bit too fine.