Stuck Mash
Well last night was a party. A slow sticky mash party. In our 24hr brew marathon, the third batch of Bock started to run off slow, and then slowed down to nothing. This is the ultimate brewhouse nightmare. Thankfully I have had this happen before, twice, in my entire brewing career. It was always with stouts though, so this is a first. The first two brews were 5-6 hour runoffs, so I knew things were going slow. We think that this is not a good batch of Munich malt. It seems to have high protein and beta-glucan levels. We made 60bbls last month without much of a problem, but that was a different lot number of malt. This doesn’t mean it won’t make good beer, heck, it might be great for flavor, but bad for lautering in the brewhouse.
I managed to get 3 bbls into the kettle before it the mash stuck. I mean stuck, nothing coming out. The bed was not even really tight. I thought that the black malt might have been blinding the screens, so I underletted (pushed water back up through the screens). Recirculated. Runoff. And damn if it didnt just slow down to nothing again after one full grant. I repeated this 4 times, and I managed to get 6 bbls of 16 degree plato wort into the kettle. I started running off at 10pm and stopped at 4am. That is 1 bbl of wort an hour!
Since my final target gravity was 15 plato, I added a barrel and a half of water, accounting for the half bbl of water that will evaporate during the boil, and brought it to a boil. Now the fun part was graining out. This wasn’t as bad as I have had before… when it will not drain at all, you can have quite a bit of water in the lauter tun. Then I have had to take the door off, and dump the mash all over the place, like the bursting of a dam. It makes an unbelievable mess. But this time I was able to let it drain enough, and it was ok. The grain was very sticky and wet, though, and it took two cart fulls to empty the lauter tun because of all the extra liquid. The first cart full was so heavy, I was only barely able to scoot it across the floor, and I think i’m a fairly strong guy!
Well I was happy I managed to save a half batch. Chris came in to relieve me at 5:30am, and I didn’t want to have to come back 12 hrs later, so I never even bothered to mash in the 4th batch. 25 bbls will have to do, we can always do another ten bbls later on. All of our beers have been slow to run off with the new malt. Hopefully this is the last of the 2002 malt and we will soon be moving to 2003 malt. 2002 was an awful year for protien levels in malt, and I can not wait to see it go. Brewing can be a real pain sometimes, but I still love it. Hey, I have another war story to tell now. If you think this is bad its really not, I have a friend who got a stuck mash and had so much suction under the screens, he managed to bend his lauter tun screens! Now thats bad!