Finnagann wrote:Thanks for puttin that down!
I'd love to start on a road to the dark side but there seems to be a few different ways of PMing and I'm a little confused
I've been reading Charlie Papazian's PM instructions (The Complete Joy Of Homebrewing 3rd ed) and he has a 4 stage mash process: 56 C for 30 min, 65-68 C for 45 min, 70C for 10 min and finally raise to 75C just before sparge.
Is this process dated? Unesessary?
G'day Finnagann,
As warra48 advised, it's not essential. You can easily make good beer at home with a single temperature infusion mash in the 60 degree range - lower end if you like dryer beers and upper end if you want the mash to make more dextrinous sugars that give you a fuller bodied beer.
If/when you get right into all grain brewing you need to know what each temperature step does to the mash. Charlie's mash schedule has a 56C rest at 30 minutes which is often called a protein rest since it's in the right zone for proteolytic enzymes. John Palmer's excellent resource called How to Brew has a very handy mash chart which I've taken the liberty of copying into this post:
With most of the grains that you can purchase, they will be well modified so a single rest should be fine. The best piece of advice I can pass on is to master your mash temperature control process and you can then look at multiple step mashes and decoction mashing when you want to brew certain beers in the traditional way...
Cheers,
TL