How To Lauter Your Mash – For Better Tasting Liquor
Clarification or filtration of wort before fermentation is the standard for producing grain-based beers. Brewers generally appreciate that the wheat grain gives the beer tannins and phenolic compounds that give the beer its bitter and astringent taste. However, distillers are not commonly sterilized. Most home burners filter and distill the fermented wort, while other burners simply distill the entire wort, the grains used, and everything else. However, there are reasons to recommend to distillers to filter, as brewers do, to remove the spent grains used in fermentation.
What are the benefits of wort filtration?
The main reason is the taste of the distillate. Distillation removes most of the grain's phenolic compounds, but some of this substance will inevitably end up in the distillate. In my personal experience, excessive contact with the consumed grain is said to give the liqueur a chemical or garlic flavor. One of the sweetest whiskeys I've tried is from a 400-year-old Belgian brewery that uses a recipe to make whiskey with just one malt. The beer is clarified by filtration, boiled down, chilled and fermented, but not bottled, and then fermented, distilled and aged in oak barrels. Despite the relatively short maturation period, the resulting whiskey is incredibly smooth.
The second reason in favor of brewing is that we use a clear, sediment-free liquid that can be fermented in a state-of-the-art conical fermenter without clogging the outlet with grain or sediment, and we can recover and reuse the yeast as needed. There are several types. There are conical fermenters on the market today, but here are a few examples.
Stainless steel - https://www.ssbrewtech.com/products Made by Pet - (https://vimeo.com/236411620) Made of high-density polyethylene: http://www.fastbrewing.com/products/fastferment
There are also models with subtle features such as integrated temperature control and gravity control. In the basement are two relatively simple 30-liter wall cones that I bought the day I was making them, which were fun. Also, as soon as the spent grain is removed, the light must be boiled for a short time to kill any microbes without the hot must dissolve the other phenols in the grain husks.
What are the disadvantages of light wort?
There is a downside to filtering the wort, but it is certainly easier to filter the wort after it has been fermented. Fermented wax is finer and filtered at a lower temperature (as opposed to wort being filtered at 70-75 degrees). In addition, "blocked" drains, where the grain bed is compact and does not allow the liquid to pass through, can be frustrating. In fact, it takes a couple of hours of extra work and some skill to sterilize, but the improvement in the taste of the final spirit is obvious.
How is lautering done?
"Lautering" and "sparging" are used almost interchangeably, but strictly speaking, lautering means using the grain itself as a filter (probably from the German word lautering).
Batch or fly sparging
There are two pupping methods, commonly referred to as "sparging batches" and "fly sparging". As the name suggests, batch regeneration takes place in two or three "batches." That is, the must is extracted from the grain, then the grain is resuspended and drained in hot water, sometimes resuspended and drained, and then rinsed a third time. For distillation purposes, the liquid from all rinses collected is collected in the digester. Batch scintillation is widely used for pre-industrial brewing. Instead of combining rinses, breweries produced "strong", "small," and "table" beers from weakened beers deflated by the rinses.