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Cereal Mash in Beersmith 3?

mattg88

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Hi,

I've been learning the ins and outs of Beersmith 3 the last week or so, so I'm not fully comfortable with it but it all seems fairly intuitive, but one thing has stumped me how to approach with the software. I'm planning a rice lager using 40% jasmine or short grain Japanese rice, and so I believe I'll need a cereal mash separate to the main mash. The first issue is it doesn't look like regular rice is an ingredient on Beersmith (just flaked rice). Say I just use the flaked rice ingredient in order to figure out an approximate OG, how would I go about creating a separate cereal mash within the software (if that is indeed possible)?

Would it be best to just leave the Beersmith recipe as is (with flaked rice in the mash) but to do my cereal mash, then add to a main mash at the start of the brew? My main concern would be to make sure the PH corresponds to Beersmith's calculations.

Thanks
 
Since the starches in rice kernels gelatinize at a higher temperature range (65C to 75C) than the starches in barley (53C to 63C), you will need a cereal mash to liberate the starches so they may be converted. Flaked rice is more commonly used in homebrewing, since that avoids the cereal mash by having the rice steam pressed in the flaking process.

Now, the good thing about the BeerSmith software is that it is fairly much customizable to your process. In fact, this is important to get the equipment profile with the yield and volume losses 'dialed' in to how you brew. Doing this improves the ability of the software to predict your outcome with some confidence.

Likewise, ingredients are easily added by each user to reflect the broad range of available materials for/used in brewing. Really, you just need to know the basic information on the yield of the fermentable or %AA of the hop to get the software to utilize these with some degree of accuracy.

Now, the difficult part. BeerSmith is set up to always run a mash with increasing temperatures. If you put in a cereal mash at say 90C, the program will adjust the order of the mash steps to place this after the saccharification rests typically occurring at 62C to 71C.

The way I worked around it the couple of times I brewed with rice was to put the cereal mash with the rice in the notes and then used the hot rice as a temperature infusion into the barley, which I doughed in for a protein rest at around 55C and used this infusion to bring the temperature up to the saccharification rest at 63C before bumping it up to 68C to finish the conversion.

You will also want to make sure you have a high diastatic base malt in order to ensure you have enough enzymes to fully convert all the starches. This was one of the reasons American lager brewers used to rely on 6-row barley as their base. These days, improvements in malting have given us much higher diastatic malts with lightly kilned standard 2-row barley than previously could be attained.

There are more than a few papers available on using rice for malting. Most are pretty scientifically based, but a couple of links you can look at are listed below.

Thailand Beer Industry Guild presentation

Use of Rice in Brewing

Hope this helps.
 
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Thanks for the in-depth reply. Those links are very interesting. From what you say, though, it sounds like I might run into issues because I have a pilsner malt as the base malt.

But as regards to Beersmith itself, in terms of predicting the OG, efficiency and PH, this is where I'm having trouble. Flaked rice is the closest fermentable already built in - do you say that would be a fine stand-in for cereal-mashed regular rice in terms of fermentable sugars?

As for PH, should I just take the water used for the cereal mash and the water used for the main mash and use the total (I'm doing brew in a bag) or is it more complicated than that?
 
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I did a rice-style lager using the rice-cooker method (ie cook the rice in a rice cooker, then throw it into the main mash with time to convert).

The mash was setup as follows in BS3:
My mash program had a proteinase step, so I put that as my first step (15 min).
I used 800g rice with 1.5L water - to reflect the 1.5L water that I was going to use in the rice cooker, I entered it as a mash tun addition in this step.
(On the day, I started the rice cooker, then got the main mash underway - once the proteinase rest was finished, the rice was already cooked and ready to add)

The rice cooker step was put in as a decoction step - I ignored the volume that BS3 states on the day. The target temp there was 64deg for 60 mins
I added the rice and actually hit my target temperature, though if I was short due to the lesser volume, I would've adjusted it with direct heat

I then had the mash out.

That was it - worked simple. If you want a specific cereal mash using barley, I could forsee doing something similar. You just need to separately work out how much grain you are going to add to the cereal mash

Hope this helps
 
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I have seen people simply mill the rice and cook it then add that to the mash. Is the only downside to that versus a cereal mash with some base malts how much fermentables it'll extract from the grain?

More specifically regarding how a cereal mash with a little barley works alongside Beersmith 3, would I be right to assume I would just keep the total base malt the same, and the water will be the total water from both mashes (the cereal mash and the main)? Would the PH and OG calculations work out fine like that? Because it's essentially two separate mash, which I don't think Beersmith can do?
 
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I have seen people simply mill the rice and cook it then add that to the mash. Is the only downside to that versus a cereal mash with some base malts how much fermentables it'll extract from the grain?

More specifically regarding how a cereal mash with a little barley works alongside Beersmith 3, would I be right to assume I would just keep the total base malt the same, and the water will be the total water from both mashes (the cereal mash and the main)? Would the PH and OG calculations work out fine like that? Because it's essentially two separate mash, which I don't think Beersmith can do?
I had no issues with fermentables from the grain/rice and I didn't mill it. Just chucked it into the rice cooker. I hit all my targets. I don't personally know exactly why the barley with the cereal is still the 'recommended' way. Someone smarter than me may be able to answer that. That, though, is why I tried the rice cooker method - the main thing you want is gelatinisation of the rice and cooking it does so (in the same way as using flaked rice). Holding it in the mash then allows the starch to convert.

Not having done an actual cereal mash with barley, I can only suggest how I would do it (at least on my first attempt!). I would do the same as I wrote above. The 1.5L as a mash tun addition was so that BS3 would tell me how much water would go into the main mash (ie what was left over). The total water volume was correct. I would take whatever grain amount you decided to use in the cereal mash and just subtract it from total grain amount - you could record that in the notes. I guess you could always enter a new fermentable item, such as 'cereal mash grain' or some such, in the ingredients and have this reflect the amount you used. The water calcs will always go based on the total grain amount, so you just adjust the base malt.

My experience was that the pH (measured ~10 mins into the main mash) and OG calculations were spot on - no issues there (or at least within expected variation)
 
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Uncle Ben's, recently renamed Ben's Original, converted rice is a great alternative. Just toss it in the mash as a direct replacement for flaked rice.
 
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