22 replies to this topic

[Kunsan90]

I have done a couple out of necessity before I upgraded my mash tun. I fellow brewer has switched to deconcoctions for his Alt's. I believe the deconcoction change has made his beer taste more authentic. I brought back several exemplars from Düsseldorf last spring and we had a side by side. They were much maltier with.My $0.02

Dave,I think you're referring to me. Yes, I have switched to performing decoctions on all my Alt's, and maybe I'm a loon, but I really feel I can taste the difference. I have brewed the same recipe back to back using single infusion and decoction mashes. People that have no clue how I brewed them always picked the decocted one as tasting better. Is that a real good test? I don't know and probably not, but what the hell. I enjoy brewing and if I wanted to save time I'd buy instead.Phil

[zymot]

This guy has a 3 part series on youtube that explains the process very well.Be sure to watch all three.You can do a couple batches and decide if it is worth the trouble.I did a Baltic Porter with a decoction step to get the malliard flavors going. I also boiled a portion of the first runnings to caramelize. It is a hefty beer, just now starting to mellow. One thing that I found counter intuitive, when you boil the decoction, you want as high of a percentage of grains and low percentage of wort as reasonably possible. This goes against the rule "Do not boil grains, you will extract tannins." The BYO wizard addressed this apparent conflict by speculating that a decoction mash is too thick to allow for tannins to leach out of the grain.I understand that Pilsner Urquell is still mashed as a decoction, and there are not any tannins in that beer.zymot

[Jimmy James]

Well, just as way of an update I racked my Kolsch today to secondary after 16 days in primary. The clarity is good and it has a really interesting color that is golden but with a tint of amber to it that I haven't seen in my lighter brews before. The grist was basically 95% pale Kolsch malt and 5% wheat. The gravity sample tasted incredible. No idea whether the color or taste have anything to do with the decoction process since I never brewed with the Kolsch malt before. One interesting observation was I got 84% ADF for WLP029 with this batch, with a reported range of 72-78% according to White Labs' website. It's just a single data point so I won't read too much into it, but it appears the decoction certainly didn't hurt my fermentation. Not sure I will decoct anything other than traditional German styles that call for it - the decoction was a lot of work. That being said I have my second planned for a Bohemian Pils I intend to brew up soon.