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As the devil's advocate....

I'm assuming you own a car. It's spot welded together isn't it?

Or the tram/train/bus you travel in to work each day?

After finally bottling this brew i have a question,what is the effect of losing 3.5 degrees during the mash?I started at 67.5 degrees hoping for a little bit more body and after 1 hour my mash lost 3.5 degrees finishing on 64 degrees.The brew fermented OK,not finishing too high,however my thermometer was reading out,so i have bought a lab. glass thermo. which after testing is near to spot on.After tasting a hydro. sample,i was surprised, it was quite nice,so whatever happened during the mash it has still given me a drinkable beer.

Hi Mark, as you noticed, the effect of having the temp drop resulted in the brew finishing at a lower gravity than expected. Lower mash temps = dry finish, something I quite like myself. That's the beauty of doing all grain, complete control over how the want the beer to turn out.

Cheers, Ed

Yeah, 67 gives you a fuller bodied beer, 65 a dryer beer. Most malts these days are "highly modified" or something, which means you don't need the full 60 minutes to get decent conversion.

I've been mashing for a full 90 minutes - not being in too much of a hurry, but after the first hour I find myself thinking about a statement I read somewhere that pretty much all the action happens in the first 20 minutes or so.

I lose a fair bit of heat from my setup, so I end up having to throw some electricity at it a couple of times during the mash.

Where were you when I was having an argument with some guy who said that you don't have to worry about the temp dropping during mashing!?

Losing a few degrees over a 90 minute mash isn't a big deal to me, especially if the mash stayed "in the zone" during the first half hour or so...spare a thought for brewers of yesteryear who had to decoct the mash to keep temps up when they mashed in timber tuns.

It is too early for me to speak definitively 'from experience' but I do know that my beers are quite drinkable and that I am without doubt obsessing about stuff that may not be important in any way, shape or form.

I also know that craft/home brewing is one of those pass-times where there is a near-equal mix of good and bad information.

We live in an analogue world, so I find it difficult to expect that any component of the process finishes at an exact point in time - you might find that the vast majority finishes at that time, but there is still a component that remains unfinished.

I figure that if you're happy with the outcome of not finishing, then go for it, but in the case of mashing (especially) there is nothing to lose by leaving it go and only the impatient will suffer.

Please note that I wrote this as cockroaches nibbled on the remnants of my brain and my wife yelled at me for not picking up milk on the way home from 'work'... If only she knew...