BEGINNERS GUIDE TO ROW BARLEY AND MASH
Welcome! Just finished publishing number eight. This is number nine. We're going into another type of mash. We're so glad you're here. Please stay and enjoy reading. Share us with your friends.
Now, today we're going to do a mash and we're going to do straight grain. We're going to use two-row barley one explain a few things or take this operatory because this was gonna be pretty quick. Can you use crack corn? Yes. Can you use whole corn? Yes, you need to, but you do need to grind those up so that you can get a dam because you know that if you just throw corn in about your water, you throw yeast in there, you know nothing's gonna happen.
Just understand if your stomach acid cannot eat through a kernel of corn. You can use all those things and you can change the amounts, but remember it the key is the water. Make sure you have enough water in order to suspend all of that stuff.
So we're going to get right at it. I just show you one at a time and all of them work and all of you have your own techniques. But the technique is important if it's effective, but don't violate the process. The process is the same. It's just a technique how you go about it, whether you use a two-gallon bucket or a three-gallon bucket, that's a technique, but the process is the same. And that's what we're gonna do today. Now we're gonna use two-row barley straight Up to row barley, I've got four pounds and I've got a little over three gallons of water 12 liters. This is a really good base for bourbon. I can mix it with another mash, maybe some of that corn man. There's a lot of things you could do with it. But I want to make sure I have enough water. So I could run this thing twice because it's only so big. See, one of the big mistakes that people make is they'll put it and only holds 20 liters at the most. And they'll put 10 or 15 pounds of grain and then all of a sudden it goes it swells up and you can't get it anything and nothing can happen. And then you've got this total mess that you've got to try to recover from.
Use enough water in the first place to make your process that much easier for you. So right now I'm going to use one and a quarter pounds per gallon and now we're going to deal with the corn It was about one and a quarter, one and a half pounds per gallon at four, four gallons and five pounds. So, way to save four pounds, little over three gallons. Now, these are greens, malted barley, malted rye. There are so many multi corns and that means that it's been brought to a germ, it's been hydrolyzed brought to a germination temperature allowed to start to sprout. And then the germination process has been halted, sprouts knocked off. And it's set aside it is now multigrain. So in that multigrain are loads and loads of starch, already formulated sugars, and what's leftover is amylase enzyme. Now there are some beta-amylase in there as well. And we discussed this once before. The substitute for beta-amylase is gluco, Emily's, because you can't extract beta, unfortunately. But they make a product called glucoamylase, and that works at fermentation temperature.
Can it does the same thing? Yes, the beta-amylase that's resident along with the alpha leis on works on its own at the proper temperatures. So now there's a lot of different things in the brewing community.
We know there's a decoction method, you can go through a protein, rest, a saccharification restaurant, all that stuff, we're going to make this real simple, I got two points that I want to make sure that I achieve. One is I want to do the protein rest, which is 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, that's 55 degrees Celsius. And I'm gonna put these up, the reason I'm doing that is that and I'm going to use Celsius in this particular inch of in this particular discussion because that's what it is.
Now with that protein rest does is it allows that green to again, soak up, release those starches, start to activate that beta-amylase, 155 degrees or 68 points, 68.3 degrees Celsius. And we're going to hold it at 68.3 degrees Celsius or better known as 155 degrees Fahrenheit, we're going to hold it there. Most of your conversion will take place in the first 30 minutes, but we hold it there for 90, just allow it to sit and so it's only soaking it 155 degrees. That's all it's doing. And then we're going to call it done.
Now, we're going to adjust, we're going to make sure that pH is correct. Then we're going to cool it down. But we did the same thing with the corn and then we're going to place it into a fermenter. And then we're going to wait because I had to do another one of those and then we're going to add them together. But remember we've got to go through the sparging routine as well and I've got another demonstration of another way to sparge these greens as opposed to the way we did the corn again. Technique versus process processes, the same technique maybe a little bit different.
You ask yourself why do I make such a big distinction between technique and process? Because the process is most important in technique is just something you develop. Everybody in our community doesn't have a Digi boil, they do not own one just an electric kettle for lack of better words. It could be used as a coffee urn. It's very useful everybody doesn't have all the same equipment. There are different techniques for getting at the same thing. Remember the one when we did the corn mash, we had a colander inside that large 30-quart pot and we used a bag sparging bag that was a rinsing bag inside so that we could keep the flaked corn separate.
So we could remove it a whole lot easier. We're going to do it because when the way they are made the heating elements are at the bottom, and there's a sensor down here at the bottom that protrudes inside when that gets gummed up, it just shuts itself off because it overheats.Your greens if they lay on the bottom and that heat irrelevant comes to keep it warm or to heat it up. It starts to burn and scorch those greens and you've had probably that experience before no matter what you're using. I always recommend that you have some sort of a standoff on the bottom.
My solution for that is just a simple screen colander. Now the screen colander has a looks like about a half-inch standoff on the bottom but it's also curved so that my sensor sits out here and it won't get gummed up. My greens will not rest on the bottom. What I've done is I've just cut the top of it off because it is one of had a lid and it fits perfectly on top but it wouldn't go inside. Once I cut that rim off, it fits. It goes it just drops all the way down to the bottom and it's perfectly the same size as the interior circumference so that no grains kind of fall over and get down on the bottom and scorch. We are at 55 degrees centigrade, Celsius centigrade. Check the pH.
I do that every time just to blow anything off that maybe 6.1 when we say 5.2 is our goal, so we use a little bit of citric acid or lemon juice, just squeeze lemon juice. After you do it a few times, you kind of knew how much it's going to take which isn't really a lot just add it to you. Then what do you do? Test your pH the meters are just amazing 565 point five. I settled out of 5.5, that's close enough right now for this kind of work. So at that level no, we're gonna focus a little bit more just what we do because my greens gonna bring it back up if I don't watch it. My brain will bring it back up a little bit, but it's not out of the realm of usefulness. You need an acidic environment for a lot of different things. One of them is to assist all those free amino nitrogen that will be produced.
Lots of little things that are going to happen, I just can't describe. So we're going to add our four pounds of two-row barley that have been crushed. This has been milled. All we do is just pour it in. That's a lot of green. I got another four-pound bag I could throw-in. I want to make sure that I take advantage of the proper process.
For the next 20 minutes and there's no way to check it after that to find out if it's been long enough. So might leave for 3020 to 30 minutes, just leave it to sit then we're going to crank up the temperature. We're going to bring it up to what was it? wait on you. 155 or 68.3 degrees Celsius that's the point. That's called the saccharification Rest and that's where amylase converts starches into fermentable sugars.
We have waited for the required time. I've got my eyedropper here with a drop in and drop of iodine, let's see what happens that just a drop you notice how quickly that dissipates doesn't turn black. I dropped like three or four more drops in that tells us we've converted all of those starches to fermentable sugars. Now it's time to do the hard work. I'm going to transfer this actually, I'm just gonna dump it into a bucket then I'm going to strain that grain real quick.
What I'll do first is the advantages of having one of these technique. So I'm gonna remove all the liquid out and out that way, I'll have all the grains left. What I intend to do is that since I have all that full of the work at this point, I've got a screen, a strain I've used, I've had this for years of the great big funnel of a BA F, big phone and what I'm going to do is place this over top of another bucket I'll put the greens and I'm gonna sparge through what do we say sparge was? it's a rinsing.
We're going to rinse all the greens and so what I should have left is probably somewhere near about less than three gallons. So that means I gotta go through this again, to get the rest of it so I can fill up a fermenter and we can start firming. One of the things I love about this hobby is that you learn new stuff all the time believe it or not, that mesh of screen with the standoff was so efficient. I just poured my sparge rinsing water in here and let it run out. So I didn't have to use that's pretty ingenious and is something I have learned. It's done and we're going to the goal or next step, which is to refill.
It was in the po is what I have leftover it's just like leftover green. Believe it or not there's a good dog biscuit recipe that I need to dig up because you mix those a little bit of an egg flour and peanut butter and you know bake those make great dog biscuits. We know we're not going to get 100% of sugars out of it. What's that environment it's ripe for growth. So if I want to use some two-row barley and start a sour mash.
That sour mash to get started along with the flaked corn we're going to do. Just add it, and then I'm going to put it in my fermenter we'll start firming.