So I brewed my first batch with the Partial Mash method I discovered at BYO. I had ordered the grain for the Strauss in the Haus Vienna Lager, what would have been my first lager as it happens. But I hadn’t planned on it taking so long for my chest freezer to be delivered. It looks like it’s a couple of weeks away still (why I don’t know) and I just couldn’t wait that long.Plus, I also got my first infected batch of beer this weekend. I felt like I lost a child. I was suspicious when I racked it to the secondary fermenter. The taste was bizarre, behind the usual almost fully fermented taste linger a god awful sourness and there was a lot of flakes of something floating around in it. After eight days in the secondary, there was no mystery. The batch was bad. It was almost like losing a loved one … without all the crying and denial and stuff. Okay so it was nothing like losing a loved one, but it still sucked.

Add to this my recent purchase of a kegging system, and the ide of waiting two week for a spare freezer and another six weeks for a lager was to much. So I decided to modify the Vienna Lager recipe to make a light ale using some dry ale yeast I had lying around.

The modification consisted mainly of replacing some of the Vienna malt with some Crystal 60L. I have no idea if these two go together but I figured, what the hell. I did everything else according to Chris Colby’s recommendations EXCEPT that I forgot to add the pound of DME. Doh! I ended up with a starting gravity of 1.030. Not what I planned.

I also ended up with less wort after the boil than the instructions predicted. I thought I was boiling about 3 gallons and that, at most, I’d lose maybe half a gallon. But I ended with barely two gallons. Needless to say I had to add a lot of water. I need to learn what that mash efficiency is all about.

My consternation about the final product notwithstanding, I enjoyed the partial mash method. The aroma of mashing grains is singular. And even though the mash added nearly an hour to the whole process, I must say that I felt like I was actually BREWING something, rather than just boiling something.

I will definitely keep experimenting with this process. I’ll either upgrade to bigger cooler (I used a two gallon) and mash more grain. Or I’ll just add more extract next time. The ratio of grain to water is different than the extract. I usually use between 6 and 7 pounds of extract and come in around 1.045. My grain bill this time worked out to about 7.5 lbs (3lbs of it in extract) which is why I didn’t add the extra pound of DME. But I guess the calculus is a little different huh.

You can look at my recipe over at Hopville. Not that I would recommend it. I’ve also posted a picture below of my igloo mash tun.

Cheers.

Categories: Features, Home Brew, Technique
Tags: Features, Home Brew, Spontaneous Pale