I ordered an AG kit of 60/-, with crushed grains. I trusted that the grains were crushed, and I mashed with them. After 80 minutes, I drained 1st runnings (2 gallons strike water, 6# grains), and they were at 1.012. I checked the grains in the mash tun, and they were plump. I squeezed the grains, and they burst open giving creamy goop. I called customer service and they suggested putting the soaked grains in a food processor. I did that, remashed, and I’ve even overshot my gravity by a couple of points. Recirculation was a little tougher, but that’s alright. So it seems that I’ve found a way to salvage the batch when one mashes uncrushed grain.
Wow thats a new one on me. Post-mash mashing. I could see it working with one of those stick blenders too.
The question is, how many beers had you drank before pouring uncrushed grain in a mashtun without noticing? Ha!
Way to save the batch abrown. A good brewer is one that can improvise when things don’t go according to plan.
Right. How did you not notice that they weren’t crushed??
I’ve always lived near the St. Paul store, and I’ve crushed the grains there, so I knew that they were crushed. I recently moved to Ohio, and I ordered five all-grain kits (having only done 1 all-grain batch back in St. Paul. I posted on here a month or two ago, right after receiving my order asking how to tell whether grains were crushed. I could see the grains through the bags, and they looked whole, with very little dust having come out of the husks. People responded to my question about how to tell by saying to check grain crushed by NB, and that will let me know what well-crushed grain looks like. Well, this was NB grain, allegedly crushed before being sent to me. So I figured that it was good. Plus, I checked thoroughly through three different kits of grains from them, all of them looking the same.
The first two batches got me about 25% efficiency, and I just figured that it was due to my being new to AG brewing, and maybe I missed my mash temps or did something dumb. I made up for it with some canned extract from the LHBS. But I was really careful on this third batch, and when my first runnings were 1.012 instead of about 1.070, which I would have expected, I inspected the grains in the mash tun. They were completely intact, and they squished between my fingers, releasing a bunch of white pasty stuff. I figured that was the starch/sugars that should have run off. I called NB and got one of the other bags of grains from them so that I could give them invoice numbers and such. I noticed that this one (Irish Red) had husks that were cracked or broken, and there were a bunch of white particles throughout the bag, as well as a lot of dust that had settled to the bottom of the bag.
NB customer service was great, helping me figure out how to salvage the batch, being totally apologetic, and giving me some store credit for the mix-up.
You could also but them in the oven at 200-400 f for a few hours and make caramel malt.
