Good point Loopie!! Hope you can close the valve on the output… or fit one… Then just a trickle… I recall my Vorlauf grant was … 12 oz ladle…
Sneezles61
I have been using a ball valve on my pump to throttle it down for the last year or so. This time, there wasn’t any liquid even flowing out of the MT to feed the pump, and I don’t wanna run dry so I had to stop trying. Never even got to vorlauf for a second.
Well the pre milled grain was definitely not crushed at .050. Looking at the picture of the NB crush it looks like a lot of whole grains
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Agreed. It looks like they crush smaller than 0.05 for some grain, and some whole grain for others. Not sure how to truly take information away from it all
No wonder people complain about efficiency when they buy grains from NB. Neither their’s nor your’s is crushed well enough. Their’s hardly looks like it’s been through a mill. I didn’t think .05 would be close enough.
I’d go to .040 and see, maybe do a smaller amount of grain but try smaller increments if you want until you get what you want at a speed that’s tolerable. Then brew with it and see what your efficiency is and adjust your gap as needed to get your efficiency where it’s consistent.
All grans should be broken most in more than two pieces and you should have a little bit of flour but not a lot. You want a lot of husks intact to help filter the bed. This can be an issue with crushing too fast.
There’s an old thread on here with pictures of well crushed grain Or just google well crushed brewing grains and look at the images.
Ok thanks for the help. I still have about 1/2 pound of a random grain, I will crush to .04 and post a photo of that tomorrow. It would be sucky, but maybe I’ll just do the entire milling by hand rather than the drill. I know it can obviously be done fine by drill, but if I do it by hand at least I know I didn’t go too fast
Husks are GOOD for the mash bed channels… I see some motor reduction motors for our small mills… About 200 RPM… Put yer drill in low speed… I’ll bet mine runs about 300 RPM.
Run the .05 stuff thru at .04… just because…
Sneezles61
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Ok I’ll run the grain thru again, and I’ll try to do low speed on the drill. I’ll keep you guys posted
So you were unable to get any wort out of your MT and into the pump? Is there anyway you mis calculated or measured your water amount? Even with a stuck mash you should have had some wort…
Anything is possible, but I don’t think so on that one. 15.5 pounds of grain, a little more than 5 gallons of water. Like I said, I even used a filter bag to see if I could pour the mash through it and salvage the brew. The liquid wouldn’t even come out of the bag, it just stayed as one large heavy mass unless I then also squeezed it. It was paste-like
I would say you are on the thick side of the grain to water ratio. Try mashing a little thinner. Maybe 1.75 qt/lb.
I believe you should only throttle the flow on the out side of your pump. Is that where the ball valve is?
Yessir, the ball valve is the pump output.
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Really? Wow I’ve never gone that high. Granted it’s my first grain mill as well, so who knows. I’ve just never done more than 1.4 qts/lb
I bought some grain bags way back when I first got into BIAB method… The mesh was so tight… it was extremely difficult to get the wort out… Your next brew, skip the bag… Go bagless… That’ll also give you a chance to see how vorlaufing sets the grain bed and filters out debris/barley chunks… You’ll get it…
Sneezles61
Firstly im not sure the speed of the drill is your problem. I started milling slower only because i thought the heat would gum up the rollers. I use a variable speed drill by hand. I used yo mill at a high speed but either way ir never changed my efficiency. I have a cereal killer in not familiar with other types
Ahhh. Well I didn’t use the bag at first, I started as I normally do with just my false bottom. When the liquid would not flow out of the MT, I poured the entire mash into a bag inside a new vessel, just trying to recoup anything I could. The bag also didn’t filter anything, so it was the same results as I had with the false bottom.
Hmmm then I wonder what the hell went wrong. I would be fine if I went super aggressive and just made it too small. But I thought I was actually being conservative for the first time, so I’m still baffled
This thread is all over the place. Crush is your issue nothing else.
If you were at 1.4 qts per gallon then you definitely had way to much flour and not enough INTACT husks in your grist. The husks create the filter and are sometimes destroyed if you run the drill too fast so yea maybe it IS drill speed. That is NOT that thick. 1.25 is considered thick but you should NOT get stuck even with that IF YOUR CRUSH IS RIGHT. Having said that I mash as high as 2qt/lb sometimes so going thinner is not a problem.
Having said all that, THATS NOT YOUR PROBLEM AND NEITHER IS THE FILTER MEDIA BAG VS BOTTOM VS WHATEVER! YOUR CRUSH IS YOUR PROBLEM
Sorry about raising my voice but there’s too much noice in here that’s not affecting your mash. Taking my grumpy self back to my coffee now. Ya’ll hold it down MFers.
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haha no problem about the caps lock/voice raise
I appreciate the feedback. I know you are correct, I just don’t know why the damn mash was so thick at THAT particular setting. I don’t have the space gauge yet, so I can’t verify. But When I used the calipers at .05, it pretty much agreed there. Any smaller and I struggle to fit the calipers into the space to measure the distance. I know every system is different, but like I said, this baffled me that it was too finely crushed/too much flower to work when the setting was approx .0375. I will make sure to use the space gauge before my next brew.
I think what I might do is take all of this leftover/extra grain (a little over 1 pound), mill it to a number, and then throw it into my MT with some water to see if it gets stuck… just as a test. I may even use the same 0.0375 to see if somehow I made a mistake in the original mill. Once I get something that actually works, at least I have a baseline to start at. I also think I may want to add some rice hulls to the mash, just to be safe, but that is a topic for another day.
