I had no idea of the diastatic power of malted barley

The corn grits in the cereal cooker will not be converted to sugar very much. The malt added to the cooker is there to break down glutens so the corn does not erupt from the cooker in a mass of hot snot ( technical term.) The actual saccharinfication for the bulk of the now gelatinized corn happens in the mash tun .

Agreed, that is crazy that they are able to use 13:1.

For the alcohol content I expect he is speaking specifically to their need to hit an exact mark everytime. For them a tenth of a percent either way probably is a big difference. This is purely speculation on my part though as I am not familiar with the processes and operations of a large scale brewery (or any brewery for that matter). :)

Duke

So, if I understand you correctly, the reporter just mis-identified the "cereal cooker" as the "mash tun", and then the Yuengling Rep who was standing in front of it and merely referred to it as "this vessel", just never corrected him. That makes sense. So I guess the purpose of the cereal cooker is to gelatinize the starches in the grits? Thanks for clarifying this.

Cheers.

Bill Velek - PERSONAL sites =

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See Dan Listermann's reply for clarification.

Bill Velek

Yes on all counts.

At least they showed off the cereal cooker. Some brewery tours don't go out of their way to talk about adjuncts.

During a tour of Miller's Trenton, OH brewery, when asked about the cereal cookers, I was told that they are no longer used. They now use corn syrup.

Considering that they don't use hops either (they use some sort of isomerized hop extract that supposedly doesn't react with UV), this doesn't come as much of a surprise.

Garbage in, garbage out.

_/_ / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail) (IIGS(

I believe most large breweries use hop extract these days .... according to Brew-Your-Own this month ;-)

Even the Germans use a lot of hop extract.

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I've never used hop extract, but wouldn't think that it is necessarily inferior to using regular hops. What's the problem with hop extract?

Cheers.

Bill Velek - PERSONAL sites =

I agree the point of the malt in that cooker is as Dan describes.

But, an amazing fact is that malt has way more than enough diastatic power than it needs to convert 13 times its weight in adjunct. From Malting and Brewing Science, as reported on HBD by Steve Alexander I think: a pound of Halcyon pale malt was found to have enough alpha amylase to convert 88 pounds of starch. (Unfortunately there's only enough beta amylase to convert 3.5 pounds of starch--so you can't get a very fermentable "beer" this way.)

And yes these are lab results from a lab process, don't try to make a beer this way unless you're just screwing around, yada yada yada.

Baums

I think most folks are misreading what was being said there. There may very well have been 13,000 pounds of cooked corn grits and 1,000 pounds of cooked barley malt in the mash tun. This would have been dumped in there from the cooker. The statement was most likely made before the additional malt was added to the mash tun. I would believe that the confusion has been a result of what was left out of the article.

Wayne Bugeater Brewing Company

In the American double mash method, the cooked adjuncts are used as strike water for the main mash. I would think that the main malt charge would have been mixed with the cooked adjuncts as they are added to the mash tun.

Somebody please tell me where I'm going wrong. Alpha- and beta- amylase are enzymes, right? Enzymes don't get used up or destroyed in the reaction, right? It seems to me that if you maintain the proper temperature, the only thing stopping the reaction is when all the starch is converted. It just depends upon how long you want to wait. So the amylase in a pound of barley malt should eventually convert the starch in any amount of adjunct. It might take a few weeks or months though.

The same argument could be applied to how many Beano tablets to use. The best answer is "none", but the question comes up from time to time. The active ingredient is galactosidase, another enzyme. This is known to continue until all the unfermentable sugars are broken down. There is no way to stop it. The yeast takes it from there, producing an extremely dry beer. The end result doesn't depend upon whether you use 4 tablets or 12, just the time it takes to run its course.

This is going by memory, but I believe at mash temperatures, both amylases are denatured over time -- they don't last indefinitely in the presence of heat. It's not actually the reactions that kill them off -- ultimately it's the heat.

Sure -- but then beano is used at a far lower temperature.

The missing piece of information is that enzymes denature over time. IIRC for brewing enzymes the time we're talking about is on the order of hours, rather than days.

Thanks, y'all. I had been wrongly thinking there was a single temperature above which the enzymes would be absolutely denatured and below which they would be absolutely stable. It is more consistent that there would be a range of temperatures and activities.

Most of the homebrewing books like to state the enzyme/temp range for the mash as an absolute (for example 150 - 158). What they don't really mention is that they're making a certain set of assumptions in order to recommend that range. It's not really the case that anything above 158 (or whatever number they give) will instantly halt conversion, but rather that the time it takes for them to denature above that temp will probably be less than the time it would take to reach complete conversion given a typical amount of enzymes available. Also, it's not really the case that your mash will not convert at all below 150, but rather that it'll likely take longer than your average brewer is willing to wait.

While it is simpler to make some common assumptions in order to give a range recommendation like that, it does sometimes lead to a few myths. Like the idea that a mashout will immediately halt conversion, which isn't really true. Or that the mash won't convert if your temps during the mash are a little too low. Etc.

We're already starting to see homebrewers pushing the boundaries of what the older books stated by getting into the 140s with mash temps. When I started brewing (around 15 years ago), that would be almost unheard of. These days it's a common technique if you want a really dry beer.

In the case of 1 lbs of grain being able to convert 80+ lbs of adjunct, that may be possible given perfect conditions, but those conditions are going to be *way* outside the area that homebrewers will be operating in. I guess in theory if you could figure out how to make an enzyme never denature you would be able to get 1 grain to convert and entire universe full of adjuncts, but you probably wouldn't want to wait for the couple of eons that it would take. ;)

John.

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Papazian's old book "New Complete Joy ...", (c)1991, p.254, states: "Alpha-amylase works best (but not exclusively!) at ... 149-153F (65-67C). It will become deactivated within 2 hours at ... 153F (67C). Beta-amylase works best (but not exclusively!) at 126-144F (52-62C). It will become deactivated within 40-60 minutes at a temp of 149F (65C)."

So, for example, if a brewer mashes-in at around 154F, and after an hour of mashing the temp has dropped to maybe 148F, I'd figure an average temp of 151F, plus a mashout that raises the temp to 170F followed by some time for vorlauf and sparging at 170F, then I'd say that according to Charlie all of the Beta should be denatured, and probably a pretty significant amount of the Alpha is denatured ... if Charlie is correct.

Homebrewing for Dummies, (c)1997, p.115, doesn't say much more than: "In terms of the mashing temperature's effect on the finished beer, higher temperatures (153-158F) create a less fermentable wort, and conversely, lower temperatures (148F-153F) produce a more fermentable wort." I do not interpret that to necessarily be a contradiction of Charlie's figures, because the ranges given are not represented as the ideal ranges for either Alpha or Beta; rather, I interpret that as a recommendation that mash should be primarily done from 148F to 158F, with the low end rendering a more fermentable beer than the high end.

John Palmer's "How to Brew" states: "The temperature most often quoted for mashing is about 153°F. This is a compromise between the two temperatures that the two enzymes favor. Alpha works best at 154-162°F, while beta is denatured (the molecule falls apart) at that temperature, working best between 131-150°F." As you can see, John Palmer's text _DOES_ 'contradict' Papazian's Alpha preferences of 149-153F because they don't even overlap, and Palmer is a bit higher, though overlapping, on the Beta-range, so I don't know who is correct on those points. It seems logical to me that all of your enzymes probably work at the highest temperatures _while_they_last_, but that they quickly denature at those high temps; it therefore wouldn't surprise me if both enzymes would be cleaving like crazy at a temp like 170F, but quickly denature before they can aggregate a lot of cleavage (hmmm ... "lot of cleavage" ... I need to get to bed, but I digress). And it would logically follow that at a very high temp, such as boiling, they probably denature immediately without cleaving anything. Just a suspicion on my part.

Of course, the effectiveness of the enzymes is affected by the pH, too.

Cheers.

Bill Velek - PERSONAL sites =