moistening the grain before chrushing

[Kaiser]

Well, I brewed the beer today. The good thing is, I hit my anticipated efficiency of 82% which I feel is darn good for a 19*P beer brewed with a 5 gal cooler mash tun, a 27qt brew pot and batch sparging. The pre-boil was 26qt @ 16.5P and the post boil was 22qts at 18.75P (SG=1.078). I boiled for only 60 min since it is a wheat and I don't have to worry about protein haze.

But this came at a price. Even with breaking less of the husks than usual, it ran slow as molasses. Usually I can sparge 60% wheat beers without rice hulls, but this one just took it's time. At times I though the manifod was clogged and I ended up removing the mash twice. The sparging took about 3 or 4 hours. I'm not sure if I will brew this one again the same way. Either a bigger mash tun or less grain with rice hulls and the addition of DME to get to the target gravity.

But it's over now and my Christmas beer is on it's way.

Kai

[Cheyco]

Daniels mentions it in DGB. His primary focus on wet conditioning grain is that it reduces the amout of color-forming polyphenols from the grain husks, thus allowing a lighter final product. He says to use 1-2% of the grain weight for the amount of water and to let it sit for about a half-hour before crushing. He does mention that it may increase lautering efficiency.

CC

[TimO]

I've watched them wet the grains at Rochester Brewing Company in Rochester Michigan prior to crushing.

[Kaiser]

In another thread of mine, others had some more questions about this technique, so I decided to update this thread with some more insight I recently got in this technique.

First of all, this is not a necessary step for brewing AG. Don't mess with it unless your are interested in this technique.

In German brewing this is known as conditioning the grain before milling. There is it achieved with low temperature steam. The goal is to raise the water content of the husks by about 2%. This will make them much less friable, which leads to less broken husk material even if the grain is milled through a smaller gap. Keeping the husks from shedding will lead to a fluffier filterbed and milling the grain finer will give you better separation from the husks, which improves the efficiency.

Conditioning the grain should not be confused with wet milling the grain which is milling wet grain and will lead to a mess for the home brewer. And I'm not sure yet, how exactly wet milling works.

How much water to use?
This is crucial. If you use to much water, you will greate a malt flour cake around your rollers which is a mess to clean. As I said earlier, the water content of the husks should be raised by about 2%. Since the husk material is about 10% of a 2-row barley malt grist, you need to add 0.2% of your grist as water. This is about 0.3 oz or a 10lb grist. But if you simply dump that water in the bucket with the malt you will not get an even distribution of that water.

I use a spritz bottle to spay the top of the malt twice. Then I mix the malt with my hand and repeat. I repeat this until the malt stops feeling dry. It gets a slight damp feel w/o feeling wet. If it feels wet you went to far.

Now I let it sit for a few minutes and start milling. After a few grinds I inspect the grind. It will look differntly to you immediately. The grains look flattened out, but when you pick them up, you see the grits and flour fall right out of the husks. If they don't, set your mill spacing closer.

If you still see a lot of shredding, maybe you need to spray on more water.

Don't worry about letting conditioned malt sit overnight. I was worried about this, but had to one night and it didn't harm the malt at all. The milled malt does not feel wet. With the example shown above, you incereased the total moisture content only by 0.2%. This is way to little to actually cause spoilage of the malt.

I'll try to get some pictures when I brew this weekend. I'll also measure how much water I use.

One more pice of advice: Do NOT grind conditioned malt in your LHBS's mill unless you know that it will work. Risking a mess with your own mill is one thing, but messing up a store's mill is something else. Not that it happened to me.