All-Grain Brew Day Walkthrough (VI: Lautering)

April 1, 2014 by 2 Comments
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Wort being drained from the lauter tun to the kettle.

This is the sixth installment in the All-Grain Brew Day Walkthrough, which started with a post on strike water preparation. 

 

Once you have mashed out and recirculated your wort, it’s time to start lautering. There are several questions you should answer before you reach the stage. For starters, how much wort are you going to collect? If you are continuously sparging, how quickly are you going to collect wort? What temperature should your sparge water be? And finally, are there any other steps you should be performing while collecting the wort?

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Lautering and the Length of Your Brewday

March 7, 2014 by Leave a Comment
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Heating your wort as you collect it saves time on brewday.

In the previous article, I discussed when you can safely stop mashing and proceed to the mash out and recirculation steps. Heading to the next step when an iodine test indicates that the mash is converted can frequently save you at least 20 minutes out of the usual 60-minute mash time specified in most homebrew recipes. Today I present another way to save time in your all-grain brew day — pick a lautering method that makes sense given how quickly you can heat your wort.

 

Lautering

Lautering is the step in all-grain brewing in which the brewer separates the sweet wort from the spent grains. Most forms of lautering involve sparging — rinsing the grain bed with hot water. This extracts sugars from the grains that did not freely drain along with the first wort. (The first wort comprises all the runnings from the lauter tun that are undiluted with sparge water.)

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Tannins in the Mash

February 7, 2014 by 4 Comments
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Too much tannin your beer can give it an iced-tea like puckering character.

Tannins are polyphenols found in a wide variety of plants, distributed among various tissues. In a later article, I’ll discuss the basic chemistry of the tannins relevant to brewing. (The types of tannins that end up in beer from the malt are different from those that originate in the hops.) In this article, however, we’ll treat them as a group because they are all related chemically, the factors that affect them are the same, and the consequences if they get in your beer are the same. I’ll discuss tannins extracted in the mash today, and cover tannins in the boil over the weekend.

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