Mash casualty

[menace2sobriety]

made a beer yesterday 80% Maris otter 20% Munich malt. Anyhow, all was well, heated Strike water, checked grain temp, mashed in, checked temp; was right where I wanted (152 degrees Fahrenheit) closed lid on cooler mash and waited 1 hour. While waiting heated my sparge water got ready to mash out and BAM!!!! Nothing coming out! Shit! Stuck sparge. So I re stir re set bed grain......nothing so I blow back into mash.......nothing. I try both of these about 20 more times. By now I'm in full panic mode. Then I tried to stick my arm in there. Nope that ain't happening. It's hot as hell! i check temp still holding at 152. So I close lid dump sparge water back into boil kettle take mash and dump in lauter tun close lid and...........there is the damn problem! The stainless steel braided hose in the bottom of my mash tun is all twisted up and pinched off. So I removed it tried to cut it several different ways to no avail. I probably was messing with it for a good thirty mins before accepting the fact that I was gonna have to drive across town to hardware store and buy a new one. So I get back its prob been well over an hour since all this started. I reheat sparge water, fix mash tun, transfer mash, check temp; 142. I get sparge water heated and start sparging check temp half way through about 152. Rest of brew night went well. My post boil Gravity was 1.062 and was supposed to be 1.065. What can I expect from this beer? I don't think it's ruined but it sure ain't right either. Thanks for any and all feedback

[brewinhard]

It will probably be just fine. It may attenuate a bit more than desired depending how long it sat at 142F for but it doesn't sound like it spent the majority of time at that low of a temperature. This happened once while brewing a 10 gallon batch of strong scotch ale with my buddy. We couldn't get the damn thing to drain no matter what. Had to dump it into an old school zapap lautertun he had sitting around and sparge in there. Temps dropped to about 138F during the transfer and sparging. Damned if that beer didn't ferment below 1.028 anyway! Funny things those enzymes are.

[menace2sobriety]

thats great news!! Now though I pitched two tubes of wlp01 and have gotten no action. it is at about 65 F but last night when I put it in the fridge it was still about 40 F and stayed there through the night. ive since gotten it up to proper temp and tried swirling around gently in bucket but still nothing. any suggestions?

[JoeBeer100]

Your wort is fine. Some people mash overnight due to time constraints. Your beer, on the other hand, is more likely to suffer due to the underpitching of yeast. This is indicated by your lack of timely fermentation.

A good tool is the yeast pitch rate calculator at www.mrmalty.com. If you want to skimp on the yeast, go with US-05. US-05 will produce great results. To me, a flask for making starters is the best $20 you can spend to improve your beer.

As for what you can do now, perhaps add another vial or 2 of yeast to bring it to the proper level. I'm not sure how much of a difference it will make at this point if the yeast has already replicated to its amount under stress. Good luck.

[PorkSlapper]

I don't remember seeing what size of batch you were making, but for most 5 gallon batches you can just transfer as much of that mash grain into a a 5 gallon paint strainer bag and place in or over your boil kettle and pour your mash liquid and sparge water back through the bag of grains. Just a trick I use for when I was having stuck mash problems. I guess I just revert back to doing BIAB instead of fucking with a stuck mash.

-Pork

[menace2sobriety]

thanks for all the input fellas!! It was slow to start but bubbled great for a good three days and on day four is still going at a rate of 1 bubble every 10 seconds. hopefully its not infected. In all the chaos and disarray I am not sure I remembered to sanitize my fermenter. I guess that's why they say "no beer till boil". and Porkslapper it was a five gallon batch. I will keep that BIAB trick in the tool box. Thanks!!