We have been working on an Austrian very old equipment and did a tripple decoction mashes. It allowed to pump the mash from the mash tun to a kettle, boil it and pump it back. It's just seems to be the question of proper piping. If you have the port above the screen of mash tun you can weld the pipes(or use the hose) to pump it to the kettle.
Very true. Also, pretty sure the pump needs to be designed for pumping particulate. If I remember correctly, impellers tend to be worse for that, but I could be mistaken.
Did a helles with a decoction step once. It was a pain in the butt, but this was back when i was in my garage with my propane setup. Maybe i'll give it a go again now that i brew in the kitchen with my anvil foundry. I do remember that beer was fantastic though. Cheers!
it was never really necessary from a conversion standpoint either. Using the same malting technology, brewers were also using single infusion mashes and step mashes via infusions or just direct heating their tuns. It's mostly a way to do step mashes without thermometers (which didn't really start showing up until the late 1700's). The flavor changes and mash viscosity and wort clarity changes are byproducts of that (not the intent). It's similar to rauchmalz, the point wasn't to create smoked malt, they just needed to dry the malt and wood/straw was what they had... so it ended up slightly smokey (I think this is where commercial smoke malt and pseudo smoke malt (taking finished malt, wetting it, and then re drying it over smoke) go awry, and they end up being too smokey as a result). Decoction doesn't really take any more time, you just have to be doing multiple processes at the same time; for example: our main mash is resting at 120-125F for 25 minutes, while your 1st decoction is heating up to a boil, then you add the decoction to the main mash at the end of the step (on a homebrew level, you have to wait to start heating the decoction, because the volume is small (relative to the size of most people's burners), but on 1bbl and larger, so long as your burner isn't disproportionally large, it takes a bit of time to boil the decoction, allowing for it to convert as it does so). 5BBL batches is about the limit (IMO) of what you can decoct manually (a stainless 5 gal bucket or a scoop shovel would be warranted), but even at 3bbl, a positive displacement pump to move mash around would be a godsend. On our 3bbl system, it doesn't take any longer to double decoct the mash than it would to direct heat the mash through steps, and it's generally done just over an hour (25min @125F, 30min @145F, 10 min @158F; then flow into the lauter and fly sparge and then press in the mashfilter/press (we're also a winery/cidery, so I have a rack and cloth press that would otherwise sit unused for 10 months out of the year)). If a brewery has the space, I still feel that having a separate mash and lauter tun (and even a cereal cooker and a mash filter/ press if you have room) is a better setup. You can tailor the vessels to their intended task easier and you can get away with cheaper vessels (less engineering and fabrication). You get less evaporative losses from a mashtun that's tall and narrow (like a drum), but a lauter tun is best as a shallow vessel (you'll need less straw/ricehulls on sticky mashes (like my wheat/rye beers, which are 80% wheat/rye, remainder being corn) as a result and wort collection tends to be faster).
Nice work! Great explanation. But for those of us who don't have the set-up, is there a caramel malt you can recommend that closely matches the flavor profile for this style of beer? BTW, I've recently been to pilsner urquell and saw their triple decoction set-up 😉
The Pilsner Urquell brewery is dope! I actually use a touch of honey malt in my pilsners, but lighter C10 or 20 should do the trick. I would say around 0.25-1% of the grain bill is a good start.
I would also suggest Melanoidin Malt which is essentially what is being created in the boiled malt. It won't bring the body to the beer - you may want some CaraPils/Dextrin malt for that - but the Melanoidins will bring that rich, toasty, malty-sweet flavor. Id say melanoidin alone will get you 80% of the way to the decoction character
Is there a particular reason that you're moving grain in addition to wort in the decoction step? Aggressively boiling the wort seems to be the important part. I have a 10bbl two-vessel system, and I just lauter, move the first ~3bbl of wort to the kettle, disable my flame switch (prevents turning on the burner until about 5bbl of wort is available), and let 'er rip for 20 minutes. I've done the same beer back-to-back, only adding the decoction step and verified the additional character that it develops.
The process of actually boiling the grain/husks extracts tannins and some extra grainy character. I would be interested in seeing a side by side with grain and without!
@tanglefootbrewing in general I think I would prefer to avoid tannin extraction. My pilot brewhouse is electric, so I don't really have a clean way to test it head to head.
Your PH shouldn't be high enough to extract too many tannins. There is some extraction from the husk, though. However it is important to have a thick mash and not simply boil the wort. Let me curse/bless you with some Narziss, Die Bierbrauerei Band 2, page 336, as translated by DeepL: "The reactions that take place during this process can be described as follows: During mashing, the carbohydrates that are soluble from the malt, such as sugars, glucans, amino acids, peptides, polyphenols, organic acids, phosphates and other minerals, dissolve. The vast majority, however, remains undissolved at first. The water-soluble substances now react with each other and with the ions in the water. (...) The first pan mash is thick: it therefore contains fewer liquid substances and enzymes than the vat mash. On the other hand, it is rich in components that need to be broken down and decomposed. This now takes place less by enzymatic and more by physical means. During the subsequent heating of the mash by approx. 1C/min, the enzyme content of the mash is utilized to a certain extent: for example, the protein-degrading enzymes in the range of 40-60C can act on the corresponding substrates for around 20 minutes, the starch-degrading enzymes from 58-78C also for 20 minutes. In some cases, heating is slowed down in these ranges and only accelerated significantly above 78C, e.g. to 2C/min, and in some cases the maintenance of defined rest periods leads to an intensification of the respective degradation processes. However, it is not necessary to wait for complete saccharification of the mash, which would take too long even at the prevailing concentration. Rather, the main task of the enzymes, especially the amylases, is to facilitate gelatinization and liquefaction through their activity and to bring this about at lower temperatures so that the subsequent boiling has a better effect. The same applies to the release of beta-glucan by the beta-glucan solubilase, which makes the starch-bearing cells more accessible to attack by the amylases. During the subsequent boiling of the mash, the cells of the endosperm are burst, the starch itself gelatinizes, high-molecular protein bodies coagulate, supported by the polyphenols that have already dissolved or are released from the husks during boiling. . The boiling time for the first thick mash is 30-45 minutes for dark malt and only 10-20 minutes for light malt. In addition to the desired physical disintegration of the "dark" mash, the reason for this is that the typical taste of dark beer only develops through vigorous boiling, through the dissolving of husk materials, through the formation of Maillard products and through caramelization on the heating surfaces (above all of fire-heated kettles). In the case of light-colored mashes, the boiling time must be limited with regard to the color. The thick mash is now pumped back to the vat mash. After this mash has largely segregated during the 2 to 21⁄2-hour break, it must be "pre-mashed" for at least 10 minutes before the end of the boiler, i.e. before the hot thick mash is pumped back in. The agitator must also run during the entire overpumping in the mash cycle to prevent the enzymes from scalding when the boiling mash is pumped in. Depending on the effect of the agitator and the size of the boiling mash, pumping back takes 10-20 minutes. If the mash is too large, a longer scalding time is necessary in order not to exceed the desired temperature range in the vat. @@tanglefootbrewing
@michaelmoineau5432 there is certainly some value to the conversation here, but we'd need a 3-way test protocol to prove anything with respect to desired outcome. Once we got there, we would find that even experienced BJCP judges would have trouble picking out the differences, let alone objectively choosing "better".
Only done a decoction a few times but those beers came out fantastic!!! Definitely a longer process but worth it for making certain styles!!! Cheers 🍻
Nice! Glad it worked out for ya. Cheers 🍻
Thank you for sharing sir!
Sure thing!
We have been working on an Austrian very old equipment and did a tripple decoction mashes. It allowed to pump the mash from the mash tun to a kettle, boil it and pump it back. It's just seems to be the question of proper piping. If you have the port above the screen of mash tun you can weld the pipes(or use the hose) to pump it to the kettle.
Very true. Also, pretty sure the pump needs to be designed for pumping particulate. If I remember correctly, impellers tend to be worse for that, but I could be mistaken.
We had a huge impeller pump designed to pump the boiling liquids.
@@GrigoryKiselev good to know! Thanks for the response.
Did a helles with a decoction step once. It was a pain in the butt, but this was back when i was in my garage with my propane setup. Maybe i'll give it a go again now that i brew in the kitchen with my anvil foundry. I do remember that beer was fantastic though. Cheers!
It's a fun experience. I love the smells and sounds of it 🍻
it was never really necessary from a conversion standpoint either. Using the same malting technology, brewers were also using single infusion mashes and step mashes via infusions or just direct heating their tuns. It's mostly a way to do step mashes without thermometers (which didn't really start showing up until the late 1700's). The flavor changes and mash viscosity and wort clarity changes are byproducts of that (not the intent). It's similar to rauchmalz, the point wasn't to create smoked malt, they just needed to dry the malt and wood/straw was what they had... so it ended up slightly smokey (I think this is where commercial smoke malt and pseudo smoke malt (taking finished malt, wetting it, and then re drying it over smoke) go awry, and they end up being too smokey as a result).
Decoction doesn't really take any more time, you just have to be doing multiple processes at the same time; for example: our main mash is resting at 120-125F for 25 minutes, while your 1st decoction is heating up to a boil, then you add the decoction to the main mash at the end of the step (on a homebrew level, you have to wait to start heating the decoction, because the volume is small (relative to the size of most people's burners), but on 1bbl and larger, so long as your burner isn't disproportionally large, it takes a bit of time to boil the decoction, allowing for it to convert as it does so). 5BBL batches is about the limit (IMO) of what you can decoct manually (a stainless 5 gal bucket or a scoop shovel would be warranted), but even at 3bbl, a positive displacement pump to move mash around would be a godsend. On our 3bbl system, it doesn't take any longer to double decoct the mash than it would to direct heat the mash through steps, and it's generally done just over an hour (25min @125F, 30min @145F, 10 min @158F; then flow into the lauter and fly sparge and then press in the mashfilter/press (we're also a winery/cidery, so I have a rack and cloth press that would otherwise sit unused for 10 months out of the year)).
If a brewery has the space, I still feel that having a separate mash and lauter tun (and even a cereal cooker and a mash filter/ press if you have room) is a better setup. You can tailor the vessels to their intended task easier and you can get away with cheaper vessels (less engineering and fabrication). You get less evaporative losses from a mashtun that's tall and narrow (like a drum), but a lauter tun is best as a shallow vessel (you'll need less straw/ricehulls on sticky mashes (like my wheat/rye beers, which are 80% wheat/rye, remainder being corn) as a result and wort collection tends to be faster).
I have been on a big German lager kick and have been decocting everything. When brewing 3ish gallon batches, the process is super easy.
On a small scale it's really simple. Glad to hear folks are making the effort on a homebrew scale!
Nice work! Great explanation. But for those of us who don't have the set-up, is there a caramel malt you can recommend that closely matches the flavor profile for this style of beer? BTW, I've recently been to pilsner urquell and saw their triple decoction set-up 😉
The Pilsner Urquell brewery is dope!
I actually use a touch of honey malt in my pilsners, but lighter C10 or 20 should do the trick. I would say around 0.25-1% of the grain bill is a good start.
@@tanglefootbrewing Thanks for the pro tip! 😊🍻
@@Timothythebrewer sure thing!
I would also suggest Melanoidin Malt which is essentially what is being created in the boiled malt. It won't bring the body to the beer - you may want some CaraPils/Dextrin malt for that - but the Melanoidins will bring that rich, toasty, malty-sweet flavor. Id say melanoidin alone will get you 80% of the way to the decoction character
@Musicman9492 also a good one! 👍
How do you chill your wort? I haven't seen a glycol chiller or plate chiller in any of the brew day videos
Sorry, just watched the beer dump heartbeaker, sorry bud
@@andrewcoen3391 a it was a bummer. But I've. Got both a HeatEx and glycol chiller. I keep cold liquor in a brite tank at 38°F. Cheers 🍻
Video quality looking a lot more solid
Hey, thank you! I'm digging the new camera for sure. 🍻
Is there a particular reason that you're moving grain in addition to wort in the decoction step? Aggressively boiling the wort seems to be the important part. I have a 10bbl two-vessel system, and I just lauter, move the first ~3bbl of wort to the kettle, disable my flame switch (prevents turning on the burner until about 5bbl of wort is available), and let 'er rip for 20 minutes. I've done the same beer back-to-back, only adding the decoction step and verified the additional character that it develops.
The process of actually boiling the grain/husks extracts tannins and some extra grainy character. I would be interested in seeing a side by side with grain and without!
@tanglefootbrewing in general I think I would prefer to avoid tannin extraction.
My pilot brewhouse is electric, so I don't really have a clean way to test it head to head.
Your PH shouldn't be high enough to extract too many tannins. There is some extraction from the husk, though. However it is important to have a thick mash and not simply boil the wort. Let me curse/bless you with some Narziss, Die Bierbrauerei Band 2, page 336, as translated by DeepL:
"The reactions that take place during this process can be described as follows: During mashing, the carbohydrates that are soluble from the malt, such as sugars, glucans, amino acids, peptides, polyphenols, organic acids, phosphates and other minerals, dissolve. The vast majority, however, remains undissolved at first. The water-soluble substances now react with each other and with the ions in the water. (...)
The first pan mash is thick: it therefore contains fewer liquid substances and enzymes than the vat mash. On the other hand, it is rich in components that need to be broken down and decomposed. This now takes place less by enzymatic and more by physical means. During the subsequent heating of the mash by approx. 1C/min, the enzyme content of the mash is utilized to a certain extent: for example, the protein-degrading enzymes in the range of 40-60C can act on the corresponding substrates for around 20 minutes, the starch-degrading enzymes from 58-78C also for 20 minutes. In some cases, heating is slowed down in these ranges and only accelerated significantly above 78C, e.g. to 2C/min, and in some cases the maintenance of defined rest periods leads to an intensification of the respective degradation processes. However, it is not necessary to wait for complete saccharification of the mash, which would take too long even at the prevailing concentration. Rather, the main task of the enzymes, especially the amylases, is to facilitate gelatinization and liquefaction through their activity and to bring this about at lower temperatures so that the subsequent boiling has a better effect. The same applies to the release of beta-glucan by the beta-glucan solubilase, which makes the starch-bearing cells more accessible to attack by the amylases.
During the subsequent boiling of the mash, the cells of the endosperm are burst, the starch itself gelatinizes, high-molecular protein bodies coagulate, supported by the polyphenols that have already dissolved or are released from the husks during boiling. .
The boiling time for the first thick mash is 30-45 minutes for dark malt and only 10-20 minutes for light malt. In addition to the desired physical disintegration of the "dark" mash, the reason for this is that the typical taste of dark beer only develops through vigorous boiling, through the dissolving of husk materials, through the formation of Maillard products and through caramelization on the heating surfaces (above all of fire-heated kettles). In the case of light-colored mashes, the boiling time must be limited with regard to the color. The thick mash is now pumped back to the vat mash. After this mash has largely segregated during the 2 to 21⁄2-hour break, it must be "pre-mashed" for at least 10 minutes before the end of the boiler, i.e. before the hot thick mash is pumped back in. The agitator must also run during the entire overpumping in the mash cycle to prevent the enzymes from scalding when the boiling mash is pumped in. Depending on the effect of the agitator and the size of the boiling mash, pumping back takes 10-20 minutes. If the mash is too large, a longer scalding time is necessary in order not to exceed the desired temperature range in the vat. @@tanglefootbrewing
@michaelmoineau5432 ya, couldn't really fit all that in the video ha. Good info though. Cheers 🍻
@michaelmoineau5432 there is certainly some value to the conversation here, but we'd need a 3-way test protocol to prove anything with respect to desired outcome.
Once we got there, we would find that even experienced BJCP judges would have trouble picking out the differences, let alone objectively choosing "better".
It would help to provide temperatures when to pull the grain, but good overview.
I just pull from the mash after 20 mins. Usually shoot for 153° F conversion temp but I don't take a reading when I pull.
Instead of decocting, could you instead use a portion of Melanoidin malt in your mash bill to achieve the same results?
You can definitely sub in some grain to get similar flavors. I personally use a bit of honey malt. 🍻
Have not done a decoction mash yet
I believe in you! 🍻