With me being a statistician you should expect brewing data posts from time to time.

Here’s an annotated graph I put together of a recent brew day. This was a particularly interesting brew day because it involved a step mash with a huge temperature ramp. Also, I had to be careful about recirculation speeds because the beer (a hefeweizen) had a largely wheat malt grain bill (such mashes have the tendency to get “stuck”). In other words, the perfect beer to put my brewery to the test…

The hefeweizen recipe called for an acid rest at 110F for 10-20 minutes, followed by a saccharification rest at 151F until conversion was complete. It took 35 minutes for my mash to reach the targeted 151F from previous 110F step. This is a bit more than a degree a minute rise. Conversion temperatures would have been first reached at 15 minutes in (around 140F-ish). This is all with my C-HERMS brewery, controlled by (and data logged by) Strangebrew Elsinore.

If I had been more aggressive with the target HLT temperature, and if recirculation speed was increased I would expect this rise time would increase dramatically. While I believe my brewery’s performance is completely adequate, I am looking into purchasing a proper false bottom for it which should allow me to confidently increase the mash recirculation speed further… because that’s what an obsession drives you to do.