Partially completing a goal. Preparing to brew my first a partial mash beer.
I have ‘stepping up’ to partial mash on my list of things to do this year. While I haven’t made any decisive progress on brewing / designing the house beer, I have made the leap toward partial mash.
I’m getting a little ahead of myself, since I have not actually brewed a partial mash yet. I ordered a partial mash kit from Austin Home Brew supply. It’s a Clone of Three Floyds Alpha King, and the kit arrived last week. For those of you who don’t know what partial mash is, it’s when some of the sugars that are used for brewing beer are created from mashing. Mashing is when the sugars are converted from the starch in the grains by soaking at a temperature between 148-160(ish). This soak allows enzymes produced during malting to change the starch to fermentable sugars (long and short chain). Most commercial beer is all grain, meaning all of the sugars are created by mashing, but it’s pretty typical for homebrewers to at least start out using all of their sugars from extract. All of my prior batches have been extract, or extract plus specialty steeping grain. Extract brewing is when you get most or all of your sugars in liquid or dry form, ‘extracted’ and concentrated by a malt house. The next step might be to steep specialty grains to add fresh grain flavor and complexity to an extract batch. However there are limitations to the beers you can make from extract, as not all grains can be found in either extract form, or are steep able. Some grains require proper mashing in order to get the desired flavors / sugar additions into your wort.