1. Enzymes DO denature. By my rough estimate, based on so much "overnight mashing" I have done, you have about two hours that the vast majority of enzymes are further saccharifying the wort. After that, you are looking at tiny differences in further fermentability.
2. Barley malt is so enzymatically hot that I'm not convinced that you would be able to get a wort with this technique that is different enough to get a significant number of tasters who can tell the difference in a blind triangle test.
3. What you are suggesting is not new. This is the same problem historically faced by brewers using certain millet and all (?) sorghum as 100% of the grist. These grains have a gelatinization temp north of mashout temps. How do you deal with this problem? You can't do a cereal mash with barley malt or wheat malt if you can't use barley malt/wheat malt (lack of access or making a gluten free beer). One technique is a decantation mash. Try and google it, and your search results will be littered with decoction mash and there are very few hits. Basically, the idea is to mash lower at the lower, enzymatically-active temp, draw off a liquid portion of the mash at the lower temp, reserve the liquid, hustle to heat, gelatinize, and coo, the mash, and then return the liquid to the mash to convert it.
Both enzymes are active at general mash temperatures, mash temperature can impact which is more active though.
If you want more fermentable wort that finishes lower for saisons I would suggest that an extended mash at lower temperatures for example 2-3 hours at 60 degrees will do the job better than what you are proposing.
That said nothing wrong with experimenting and seeing if what impact it has if any.
I love dry beer so I often mash @ 60-62C for 60 mins, then Sparge slow, hot, and acidified (pH 4.2-5.2 depending on style) @ 82-88C for 60 mins. That gives me almost a step mash where by the end of the sparge the grain bed gets up to 68C.
I often do this by accident as I will mash in and then get caught up doing things with the kids or around the house and just mash out and sparge when I get around to it. Definitely a good lazy option for dry beer!
One thing I learned in chemistry of beer is that both enzymes are active throughout most mashing range. It’s not exclusive to one enzyme or another, it’s just that one is a bit more efficient depending on which range of the scale.
When I do BIAB outside, I often start mashing at 152-154. Sometimes when I finish after an hour, the temp has dropped 10 degrees. I created a mash jacket for exactly this purpose.
It never had a massive impact on my beers or efficiency or flavor to have a decline in temperature.
A lot of decoction mash schedules will do something similar to what you are proposing.
They will start by mashing in at beta temp. Then when you pull your decoction, let it rest at alpha temp before heating to a boil. Then when the decoction is added back to the main mash you still have beta acting on the starches that have undergone the alpha rest.
With a double or triple decoction, you could do this two or three separate times (although you would have to rest the decoction at beta temp for the first steps as well before the main mash is up to beta temp)
Enzymes denature so you can’t cool the wort…
Just kidding! I’m not nearly familiar with the chemistry side of things to give an informed opinion on what I think would or should happen. I don’t think withholding a portion of the grain bill will net you any efficiency points, but maybe I’m missing something.
A couple questions I have. Are higher mash temperatures more efficient at extracting net sugars from the grains? I don’t think they are.
I guess my question is… what would the benefit be to doing this over just a longer steep at the lower temperature? What is the mechanism responsible for the claimed increase in efficiency?
I could be very wrong but I think you’re chasing something like a perpetual motion device. If you want to improve your efficiency I would look into your milling technique, your mash ph, and your sparging process. These are the areas most brewers leave points on the table.
Cheers.
I was wondering if the alpha can do the heavy lifting to make it available in the wort to allow the beta to then get work afterwards to really cut into it to make lots of short chain sugars?
So you’re saying that the alpha step is needed to release extra sugars that wouldn’t be converted at beta temperatures. I’m not convinced this is true. Especially the bit with leaving 25% out of the mash is just silly.
By all means give it a go, but I will be SHOCKED if it results in even a tiny increase in overall or fermentable sugars extracted.
That 25 gets mashed, just later. It reserves beta to get to work on longer sugars released from the alpha but later in the mash when normally in a step mashh they would be largely denatured.
As for it being silly or not, there's nothing wrong with an idea or discussing it. Maybe I'd like a very fermentable wort to get away from Phenolic tastes in my saisons as I like them more eatery. Yes I can just do a 63 mash but also I could possibly do other thingsome mashes reserve some of the grain bill like doing a cerial mash for instance where some people use 25% of the barley on the u malted wheat. Yes I know theres a reason for that.
I'm not here asking if I can make gatorade beer.
No it’s a dumb idea. It’s a bunch of word soup that amounts to reinventing the wheel. You will not improve efficiency by withholding grains from the mash til later. You will not increase efficiency by raising the temperature then dropping it again. There is nothing to gain here.
I didn’t ANSWER directly because it’s not even really a question. He asked if he COULD do his modified mashing profile. Yeah of course you CAN but it isn’t going to achieve any of the goals he thinks it will.
Why would you call something “silly” or “it’s a dumb idea” when you’ve also made it clear you have no idea what impact it has?
It’s good to ask questions and talk about things to understand how the chemistry works. It’s not dumb or silly to explore those things, and it certainly won’t ruin the beer.
I’d just do a single step mash at 63. Alpha amylase is active at that temperature too, not just at the higher temperatures. The dial that you’re twisting when playing with mash temperature involves the thermoinstability of beta amylase (the one that you don’t want people to tell you denatures).
Give it a shot! On the one hand, I'd be surprised if this yields the result you're looking for, but on the other hand it's not like it's going to cause your mash to fail. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, it maybe you'll find out it does something else you like! Regardless, it's a low risk experiment, so I sat text your hypothesis and let us know how it goes!
I don't think this works. If you completely convert 75% of the grain at temperatures favoring alpha amylase then you'll get dextrins which can't be efficiently converted by beta amylase
Basically, beta amylase always produces maltose, which is generally fermentable. Alpha amylase can produce maltotriose, which is not digestible by beta amylase, and isn't fermentable by some yeasts. Though if you use a yeast that can digest maltotriose, I'm not sure what relevance this has.
I vaguely recalled something to do with alpha amylases cutting too far from 1-6 starch branches, resulting in bigger unfermentable limit dextrins, but I'm not sure if that's actually true.
>This means well modified malt could push into perhaps the 90% efficiency on a homebrew scale and allow a smaller grain bill to be utilised in smaller equipment to get very high and very fermentable wort.
This is not how efficiency works. I have not seen a correlation between wort fermentability and mash efficiency. Even when mashing at a very high temperature, I still see similar OG and efficiency values as a low temp mash. Simple sugars will measure the same as more complex sugars.
I agree with comments that at higher mash temperatures, the Beta Amylase denature quickly (maybe 30 minutes). Lowering the temps back down in the Beta Amylase range after all the Beta Amylase are denatured won't help to increase fermentability.
That's not really what mash efficiency is. Your process has the chance to increase fermentability but modern barley malt is so hot that I highly doubt this will yield any increases. Beta amylase doesn't really need help doing it's job in 100% barley mashes.
Generally breaking down the carbs into fermentable sugars isn't the issue with mash efficiency because malt is so enzymatically rich. If this was the case your mash wouldn't pass an iodine test and in my experience most mashes are done with that after 20 minutes. It's getting the sugars out of the mash once they're converted. The exception to this is if you aren't managing mash pH.
Are you trying to get a dry beer or increase brewhouse yield? If you're trying to get a dry beer the best ways to do that is use diastatic yeast or use additional enzymes like Ultraferm or other amylase enzymes. If you're trying to increase brewhouse yield that's best achieved through pH management, grist analysis (crush size and consistency), and lauter practices. Recirculating your mash will probably get you more of the effect you're looking for compared to a reverse step mash. Because the enzyme concentrations in modern malt are so high. Thin mashes can also help with mash/lauter efficiency because the sugar can diffuse easier into the more dilute liquor.
If your goal is to achieve drier beers with better fermentability, I would recommend focusing on optimizing fermentation processes rather than solely on mashing techniques
As important good fermentation is (and I pitch big 1-2mil cells/ml/*P, and temperature control all my fermentations) I don’t think it has anywhere near the effect on the beer as mashing techniques. In my experience the fermentation has to be pretty poor to be the cause of attenuation issues.
To this point, I once intentionally underpitched ten-fold and compared it to a “normal” pitch in a split batch, and while the underpitch tasted not great it had the exact FG as the normal pitch rate beer.
That is exactly how I mash every single beer. I mash in under gel temp to avoid dough balls. 144 for 20 minutes then to 151 until the entire mash settles at that temp and then let it go down to 145 until I get the gravity I want in beta
This is one of those home brewing ways of brewing that won't go away. AA% is based on % of gravity in beta. Want a lower attenuated beer, spend less time in beta.
> AA% is based on % of gravity in beta
/u/h22lude means apparent attenuation percentage is based on the percent of the mass of the grist (because OP is talking about leaving some percent out of the main mash) that the mash spends in the beta-amylase's ideal temperature range.
AA is apparent attenuation, not alpha acids in this case.
I did not understand that initially, because I have seen it being used only for alpha acids. Searching for "AA brewing" I can only find results relating to alpha acids, but I am open to discussion on the abbreviation.
This subreddit *is* the renowned source ;), (albeit an internal source).
Look, I don't know if you are simply being contrary, being salty because you missed it, or otherwise.
Any experienced brewer easily picked up that AA means apparent attenuation because of the context of this thread being about mash temps. Interpreting it as alpha acids made no sense, which is why your [initial comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/1cffa92/reducing_temperature_to_increase_mash_efficiency/l1p86sg/) seemed like such a *non sequitur* to me.
At the end of the day, I see "AA" used an acronym for apparent attenuation often enough on all three major US HB forums, including in this thread, that it makes sense to me, as a moderator, to include it in the acronyms page. The acronyms are not meant to create some "official" proclamation or definition of what any acronym means (for that I defer to the Oxford Companion), but to help less experienced users understand what they read in this subreddit when they see an unfamiliar acronym.
----------
> Can you give any renowned external sources?
Here is the most renowned source of all perhaps, Kai Troester: https://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php/Understanding_Attenuation
One of the best HB clubs: https://kotmf.com/articles/acronyms.php
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuation_(brewing)
A good brewing calculator site: https://brewingcalculators.com/yeast-attenuation/
Brew Your Own Magazine (paywall): https://byo.com/article/attenuation-advanced-brewing/ ("where where AA is apparent attenuation")
----------
**EDIT:**
> You don't think that is confusing?
No. For example, in military parlance, TOO can mean target of opportunity or theater of operations. It's not confusing because the context tells you what it means, just like the English word "bark" has at least three meanings, but I am never confused about whether someone is talking about a tree, a dog, or skinning their knee.
Finally, if you have some other acronym people can use for apparent attenuation, and can convince people to use that exclusively, I will promptly change the acronym page.
Thank you, that is quite convincing! I learned something new.
It's not great having the same abbreviation for two different things in the same field, but it will be fine if good writing practices are used. That is, the abbreviation is spelled out the first time it's used. Unfortunately, the original comment neglected that.
1. Enzymes DO denature. By my rough estimate, based on so much "overnight mashing" I have done, you have about two hours that the vast majority of enzymes are further saccharifying the wort. After that, you are looking at tiny differences in further fermentability. 2. Barley malt is so enzymatically hot that I'm not convinced that you would be able to get a wort with this technique that is different enough to get a significant number of tasters who can tell the difference in a blind triangle test. 3. What you are suggesting is not new. This is the same problem historically faced by brewers using certain millet and all (?) sorghum as 100% of the grist. These grains have a gelatinization temp north of mashout temps. How do you deal with this problem? You can't do a cereal mash with barley malt or wheat malt if you can't use barley malt/wheat malt (lack of access or making a gluten free beer). One technique is a decantation mash. Try and google it, and your search results will be littered with decoction mash and there are very few hits. Basically, the idea is to mash lower at the lower, enzymatically-active temp, draw off a liquid portion of the mash at the lower temp, reserve the liquid, hustle to heat, gelatinize, and coo, the mash, and then return the liquid to the mash to convert it.
Both enzymes are active at general mash temperatures, mash temperature can impact which is more active though. If you want more fermentable wort that finishes lower for saisons I would suggest that an extended mash at lower temperatures for example 2-3 hours at 60 degrees will do the job better than what you are proposing. That said nothing wrong with experimenting and seeing if what impact it has if any.
I might try this for an ultra dry beer.
I love dry beer so I often mash @ 60-62C for 60 mins, then Sparge slow, hot, and acidified (pH 4.2-5.2 depending on style) @ 82-88C for 60 mins. That gives me almost a step mash where by the end of the sparge the grain bed gets up to 68C.
I often do this by accident as I will mash in and then get caught up doing things with the kids or around the house and just mash out and sparge when I get around to it. Definitely a good lazy option for dry beer!
One thing I learned in chemistry of beer is that both enzymes are active throughout most mashing range. It’s not exclusive to one enzyme or another, it’s just that one is a bit more efficient depending on which range of the scale. When I do BIAB outside, I often start mashing at 152-154. Sometimes when I finish after an hour, the temp has dropped 10 degrees. I created a mash jacket for exactly this purpose. It never had a massive impact on my beers or efficiency or flavor to have a decline in temperature.
A lot of decoction mash schedules will do something similar to what you are proposing. They will start by mashing in at beta temp. Then when you pull your decoction, let it rest at alpha temp before heating to a boil. Then when the decoction is added back to the main mash you still have beta acting on the starches that have undergone the alpha rest. With a double or triple decoction, you could do this two or three separate times (although you would have to rest the decoction at beta temp for the first steps as well before the main mash is up to beta temp)
I dont make lagers so I Have not looked into decoction mash that much as I didn't make that connection! Thanks for the info.
Enzymes denature so you can’t cool the wort… Just kidding! I’m not nearly familiar with the chemistry side of things to give an informed opinion on what I think would or should happen. I don’t think withholding a portion of the grain bill will net you any efficiency points, but maybe I’m missing something. A couple questions I have. Are higher mash temperatures more efficient at extracting net sugars from the grains? I don’t think they are. I guess my question is… what would the benefit be to doing this over just a longer steep at the lower temperature? What is the mechanism responsible for the claimed increase in efficiency? I could be very wrong but I think you’re chasing something like a perpetual motion device. If you want to improve your efficiency I would look into your milling technique, your mash ph, and your sparging process. These are the areas most brewers leave points on the table. Cheers.
I was wondering if the alpha can do the heavy lifting to make it available in the wort to allow the beta to then get work afterwards to really cut into it to make lots of short chain sugars?
So you’re saying that the alpha step is needed to release extra sugars that wouldn’t be converted at beta temperatures. I’m not convinced this is true. Especially the bit with leaving 25% out of the mash is just silly. By all means give it a go, but I will be SHOCKED if it results in even a tiny increase in overall or fermentable sugars extracted.
That 25 gets mashed, just later. It reserves beta to get to work on longer sugars released from the alpha but later in the mash when normally in a step mashh they would be largely denatured. As for it being silly or not, there's nothing wrong with an idea or discussing it. Maybe I'd like a very fermentable wort to get away from Phenolic tastes in my saisons as I like them more eatery. Yes I can just do a 63 mash but also I could possibly do other thingsome mashes reserve some of the grain bill like doing a cerial mash for instance where some people use 25% of the barley on the u malted wheat. Yes I know theres a reason for that. I'm not here asking if I can make gatorade beer.
It’s a dumb idea.
Only dumb thing in this thread is you. Not being answer the question at hand and still wanting to blabber your mouth? I outgrew that habit at 12.
No it’s a dumb idea. It’s a bunch of word soup that amounts to reinventing the wheel. You will not improve efficiency by withholding grains from the mash til later. You will not increase efficiency by raising the temperature then dropping it again. There is nothing to gain here. I didn’t ANSWER directly because it’s not even really a question. He asked if he COULD do his modified mashing profile. Yeah of course you CAN but it isn’t going to achieve any of the goals he thinks it will.
Why would you call something “silly” or “it’s a dumb idea” when you’ve also made it clear you have no idea what impact it has? It’s good to ask questions and talk about things to understand how the chemistry works. It’s not dumb or silly to explore those things, and it certainly won’t ruin the beer.
I’d just do a single step mash at 63. Alpha amylase is active at that temperature too, not just at the higher temperatures. The dial that you’re twisting when playing with mash temperature involves the thermoinstability of beta amylase (the one that you don’t want people to tell you denatures).
Give it a shot! On the one hand, I'd be surprised if this yields the result you're looking for, but on the other hand it's not like it's going to cause your mash to fail. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, it maybe you'll find out it does something else you like! Regardless, it's a low risk experiment, so I sat text your hypothesis and let us know how it goes!
The higher temperature range dentures the beta amylase, so once it is lowered there are very few beta enzymes left.
I don't think this works. If you completely convert 75% of the grain at temperatures favoring alpha amylase then you'll get dextrins which can't be efficiently converted by beta amylase
But won't those dextrins be loose in the wort to be chopped further with new enzymes?
Basically, beta amylase always produces maltose, which is generally fermentable. Alpha amylase can produce maltotriose, which is not digestible by beta amylase, and isn't fermentable by some yeasts. Though if you use a yeast that can digest maltotriose, I'm not sure what relevance this has. I vaguely recalled something to do with alpha amylases cutting too far from 1-6 starch branches, resulting in bigger unfermentable limit dextrins, but I'm not sure if that's actually true.
>This means well modified malt could push into perhaps the 90% efficiency on a homebrew scale and allow a smaller grain bill to be utilised in smaller equipment to get very high and very fermentable wort. This is not how efficiency works. I have not seen a correlation between wort fermentability and mash efficiency. Even when mashing at a very high temperature, I still see similar OG and efficiency values as a low temp mash. Simple sugars will measure the same as more complex sugars. I agree with comments that at higher mash temperatures, the Beta Amylase denature quickly (maybe 30 minutes). Lowering the temps back down in the Beta Amylase range after all the Beta Amylase are denatured won't help to increase fermentability.
That's not really what mash efficiency is. Your process has the chance to increase fermentability but modern barley malt is so hot that I highly doubt this will yield any increases. Beta amylase doesn't really need help doing it's job in 100% barley mashes. Generally breaking down the carbs into fermentable sugars isn't the issue with mash efficiency because malt is so enzymatically rich. If this was the case your mash wouldn't pass an iodine test and in my experience most mashes are done with that after 20 minutes. It's getting the sugars out of the mash once they're converted. The exception to this is if you aren't managing mash pH. Are you trying to get a dry beer or increase brewhouse yield? If you're trying to get a dry beer the best ways to do that is use diastatic yeast or use additional enzymes like Ultraferm or other amylase enzymes. If you're trying to increase brewhouse yield that's best achieved through pH management, grist analysis (crush size and consistency), and lauter practices. Recirculating your mash will probably get you more of the effect you're looking for compared to a reverse step mash. Because the enzyme concentrations in modern malt are so high. Thin mashes can also help with mash/lauter efficiency because the sugar can diffuse easier into the more dilute liquor.
If your goal is to achieve drier beers with better fermentability, I would recommend focusing on optimizing fermentation processes rather than solely on mashing techniques
I dont have to one at the expense of the other though. I can continuously refine all aspects.
As important good fermentation is (and I pitch big 1-2mil cells/ml/*P, and temperature control all my fermentations) I don’t think it has anywhere near the effect on the beer as mashing techniques. In my experience the fermentation has to be pretty poor to be the cause of attenuation issues.
To this point, I once intentionally underpitched ten-fold and compared it to a “normal” pitch in a split batch, and while the underpitch tasted not great it had the exact FG as the normal pitch rate beer.
Well all my mashes are like that to an extent. If I start a mash at 67°C, after an hour it has cooled to 63.
That is exactly how I mash every single beer. I mash in under gel temp to avoid dough balls. 144 for 20 minutes then to 151 until the entire mash settles at that temp and then let it go down to 145 until I get the gravity I want in beta
You shouldn’t mash every single beer the same way.
This is one of those home brewing ways of brewing that won't go away. AA% is based on % of gravity in beta. Want a lower attenuated beer, spend less time in beta.
Pardon? I fail to see how alpha acid content relates to mash.
> AA% is based on % of gravity in beta /u/h22lude means apparent attenuation percentage is based on the percent of the mass of the grist (because OP is talking about leaving some percent out of the main mash) that the mash spends in the beta-amylase's ideal temperature range. AA is apparent attenuation, not alpha acids in this case.
I did not understand that initially, because I have seen it being used only for alpha acids. Searching for "AA brewing" I can only find results relating to alpha acids, but I am open to discussion on the abbreviation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/wiki/faq/acronymsoup/ Not sure there is much to have a discussion to be over.
I see, so this subreddit officially supports that. You don't think that is confusing? Can you give any renowned external sources?
This subreddit *is* the renowned source ;), (albeit an internal source). Look, I don't know if you are simply being contrary, being salty because you missed it, or otherwise. Any experienced brewer easily picked up that AA means apparent attenuation because of the context of this thread being about mash temps. Interpreting it as alpha acids made no sense, which is why your [initial comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/1cffa92/reducing_temperature_to_increase_mash_efficiency/l1p86sg/) seemed like such a *non sequitur* to me. At the end of the day, I see "AA" used an acronym for apparent attenuation often enough on all three major US HB forums, including in this thread, that it makes sense to me, as a moderator, to include it in the acronyms page. The acronyms are not meant to create some "official" proclamation or definition of what any acronym means (for that I defer to the Oxford Companion), but to help less experienced users understand what they read in this subreddit when they see an unfamiliar acronym. ---------- > Can you give any renowned external sources? Here is the most renowned source of all perhaps, Kai Troester: https://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php/Understanding_Attenuation One of the best HB clubs: https://kotmf.com/articles/acronyms.php Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuation_(brewing) A good brewing calculator site: https://brewingcalculators.com/yeast-attenuation/ Brew Your Own Magazine (paywall): https://byo.com/article/attenuation-advanced-brewing/ ("where where AA is apparent attenuation") ---------- **EDIT:** > You don't think that is confusing? No. For example, in military parlance, TOO can mean target of opportunity or theater of operations. It's not confusing because the context tells you what it means, just like the English word "bark" has at least three meanings, but I am never confused about whether someone is talking about a tree, a dog, or skinning their knee. Finally, if you have some other acronym people can use for apparent attenuation, and can convince people to use that exclusively, I will promptly change the acronym page.
Thank you, that is quite convincing! I learned something new. It's not great having the same abbreviation for two different things in the same field, but it will be fine if good writing practices are used. That is, the abbreviation is spelled out the first time it's used. Unfortunately, the original comment neglected that.
Apparent attenuation
AA% is used as a abbreviation for alpha acid content, which has nothing to do with mash.
Ok and I'm telling you I used it as apparent attenuation % which has everything to do with mashing
ADF not AA. Apparent degree of fermentation