I never thought that malt conditioning would find so many fans so quickly since it is one of those techniques that aren't really necessary and add a bit more work.
Let me see if I can address concerns and questions raised here:
Major, I see your problem. Conditioning 20+ lb of malt is difficult unless you build yourself a cement mixer type apparatus in which you can mix the malt while you spay it with water. I thought of adding something like this to a mill-stand if I ever find the time to build one. But there is no need to condition the malt in the first place if you don't have run-off issues.
Wheat malt doesn't have husks by a pericarp that gets somewhat preserved through conditioning. Just look at the link that was posted in the original thread. It shows pictures of dry and conditioned wheat malt.
Malt conditioning is not wet milling. The latter involves milling malt under water. This is very messy and unpractical for a home brewer. Malt conditioning only uses a little water to raise the husk moisture content. If properly done, there is only little to no free water on the grains during milling. That's why it works so well with conventional mills.
You can condition and mill the night before. I have done it many time w/o problems. The amount of moisture added is too little to get bacteria, mold or yeast started on the grain. These days I condition and mill the grain while the strike water is heating. It fits well in that time and does not lengthen my brew day.
If you do decoctions, you also have the option to mill much coarser since the intensity of the decoction mash can deal with much coarser grists while giving you the same conversion efficiency (i.e. amount of extracted sugar)
I haven't tried conditioning the night before and milling the day of brewing. I thought that the moisture would have penetrated further than the husks and the conditioning would not be as effective. I guess there is still a lot of room for experimenting and finding practices that may even work better than what I have published.
I have not tried it with a corona mill but are very interested in hearing about your experiences. Some brewers in my club have them and I may try to borrow one some day to test it for myself.
Malt conditioning raises the grist volume by about 30%. But that doesn't mean that the mash volume will be greater since the actual volume of the malt solids is not increased. The grist is just "fluffier" and more open. Which is a nice thing in thin mashes, which I'm advocating as well, since the grain is distributed more evenly throughout the mash.
I don't have a problem with rusting rollers. The only rust I have is on the adjustment knob and that doesn't get in contact with the conditioned malt anyway.
I used to say that less husk shredding means less astringency, but I have backed off from this statement as there is no mention of this in the literature and I have no data to support that. Bamforth and Lewis say the same in "Essays in Brewing Science".
In the end you should see it as just another tool that you may or may not use in your brewing. It's not the key to brewing excellent beers nor will be a guarantee against stuck sparges. It just allows you to mill a bit finer while maintaining run-off speed. If you mill too fine you'll still get a stuck sparge since there will be too much flour in the grist. As with all new techniques: If you are interested give it a try and see for yourself if it is worth the added effort. If you can hide the added time behind a longer process step (e.g. heating strike water) wile improving lauter speed, malt conditioning can actually save you time. But I have not done good enough side-by-sides to confirm this.
Kai
Topic: Malt conditioning rocks! (Read 22995 times)
