How much mash does a tun weigh?

I injured my back a few weeks ago, so my plans to brew in late June early July were sidelined like Danny Hultzen.  Brewing is a very physical and mental process, but not like pitching for the Seattle Mariners'.  After several trips to the chiropractor, I felt good enough that I needed to brew an IPA, since it was hot outside and an IPA sounded real tasty.  Of course, it's the middle of July in Houston so working outside is about like trying to work in a 350F degree oven.  Add to that notion that the process takes nearly 8 hours and I was hoping counting on several indoor breaks with A/C and a cold drink.  It had been several months since my last brew day and I didn't want to wait until November to brew again, especially since my last two attempts at brewing sucked.

I had this new mash tun I purchased from Northern Brewer along with a Blichmann Autosparge another tool that lets me step away from the brewery and not worry about making a mess. The mash tun will introduce a new variable into the process and as I've mentioned before, changing any little thing can, just maybe create the best beer ever, and if I don't know what I changed, I may never be able to make it again. Not to get on too much of a tangent, let's talk about trigonometry!  No, let's not.  This variable thing has happened to me before with the Pedigree Porter recipe.  This was an awesome beer I had been able to make exactly one time.  It took me several re-brews to discover that there are both English and American versions of chocolate malt.  Coincidentally, they taste nothing like each other.  So wandering into the local brew shop and asking for "Chocolate malt" will give you a random beer, unless they ask you "English or American".  Live and learn on that one.

Back to the IPA.  I may have mentioned before that the other variable was changing water supplies.  To minimize the effect this has on my beer, I make my own water.  No, I'm not pounding hydrogen and oxygen atoms with a hammer hoping they stick together, I use RO (Reverse Osmosis) water and add minerals back into it.  The water we have here is terrible.  They say it's safe for drinking, but it tastes like stagnant pond water and you can't make good beer with pond water.  At least not if you want to drink it, or serve it to friends. Unless you secretly hate them. The RO unit filters out most everything, but that also means if I want water like Dublin, no problem.  Burton on Trent, easy.  Of course nothing beats the geologic scale of the real thing, but by doing some kitchen table chemistry (or using a spreadsheet), I can create a decent water for whatever beer style I'm making.


Wait, you didn't know that different beers require different waters?  Think about this for a minute; is Guinness known for their Pale Ale?  No.  That's because they can't make a good one with the water that occurs naturally there.  Of course, nobody knew why when this all started, it took a long time to figure this out.  Essentially, darker grains lower the pH (increase the acidity) of the mash where all the beery enzymatic magic happens, so if your water contains more buffering minerals (like chalk or bicarbonate), you can add more dark grains like for stout and porter and still get great beer.  If your water has minerals like sulfides or chlorides, you should use paler grains (like for pale ale and lager).  To make my water, I use a 3 beam balance scale like you used in high school chemistry because it's accurate to a gram and I'm not making huge adjustments to the water.  For example, in this IPA I'm using 9 gallons of mash water to which I'm adding 21 grams of these salts:

• 2 grams of  chalk (CaCO3)
• 4 grams of gypsum (CaSO4)
• 4 grams of calcium chloride (CaCl2)
• 6 grams of epsom salt (MgSO4)
• 2 grams of baking soda (NaHCO3)
• 3 grams of salt (NaCl) - pure, not iodized table salt

That's less than an ounce of various salts in 9 gallons of water.  See, not much.  I use a coffee filter because it weighs next to nothing.  I tried using a small plastic bowl but it weighed so much I was measuring the weight of the bowl and not the salts. I'll add the same 21 grams of salts to the boil kettle to get the right flavor in the finished beer, instead of adding them to sparge water (clean water used to rinse the grains of all sugars after the mash).  FYI -No, I do not have a meth lab like Walter White.

Here on the right you can see the auto-sparge which appears to have been modeled after a chrome toilet fill valve and that I'm still using the same hacksaw and copper pipe manifold I used in the old mash tun, I have had real good luck with it not clogging and getting excellent extraction from the grains.  Extraction can be affected by several other variables, I won't bore you with today.  Maybe another time! I know you're
looking forward to it.

I'll put some more details behind the heat exchange system another day, but as you can see from this image the Hot Liquor Tank (basically a hot water heater) is set at 150F and the mash temp is 147F so there is a couple of degrees lost in the exchange but that's within a degree of the desired magical 148F where the enzymes can break down the starch into maltose.  It's the same experiment you did in school where if you chew a cracker long enough it becomes sweet because your enzymes break down the starch in the cracker to a simpler sugar. At least, that's the crazy stuff we did at my school, way back in the day, before cell phones and personal computers, or the wheel.  Malted grains are allowed to germinate so that the enzymes needed to breakdown the starch are developed and then the process is halted by drying them so that I can control it later with temperature.  You can read all about that here if you're real bored.  

The new mash tun worked great, I must say.  I just had a flash back to Ed Grimley talking about Pat Sajak, I must say.  The auto-sparge worked as advertised allowing me to walk away from the system while it "fly-sparged", meaning to run off the mash liquor into the boil kettle while adding the same amount of 168-170F water to the mash tun to "rinse" the grains of all sugars.  My efficiency was much higher than with the old mash tun. I have no theories on that, it just is and I'm not worrying about it.  

As can be seen in this last picture, the 15 gallon tun got pretty full with 9 gallons of water and 32lbs of grain.  I'm real close to the limit of my system.  I'm thinking that anything over 1.070 gravity (around about 8% ABV) would require the addition of some extract or sugar to the kettle. The best part by far was how easy it was to clean.  I struggled with the old keggle to get the spent grains out of the thing in the first place and then to try and clean all the bends and folds in the metal was a major pain.  This was super easy.  The grain just dumped right out into a hefty bag and a quick rinse cleaned it up real well.

This has been a real long post.  I hope you enjoyed reading it.  If not, leave your comments for me and I'll be sure to ignore them.