We have a 20 bbl two-vessel system (mash/lauter + kettle/whirlpool). We make a hearty brown ale with about 10% flaked rye in the mash. We have been finding over the last 6 months that occasionally, fairly exclusively to this beer, one of the ports below the screen will get plugged up with malt debris reducing our efficiency (we usually yield about 25% less wort when this happens). The manifold from the tun has four 1" ports that feed into a 1/5" header into the mash pump into the kettle.
Very often we will double or triple batch and we are more likely to have this happen on the second or third batch of the run, but not necessarily. Brewers are careful to rinse underneath the mash tun and flush out debris between runs. We have tried adding rice hulls to the mash tun before adding the rye which seems to have slightly improved our failure rate but has not eliminated it altogether. We will mash out this beer since we are going for something fairly medium-full bodied and trying to preserve attenuation profile. During mash out we usually have to spin with our rake at a pretty fast speed to keep temperature uniform, we theorized that we might be grinding malt (or rye) dust into the screen during this mash out process. We have other beers we make via a very similar process with no issues, so I assume it's the rye. This issue happens maybe every 3-5 batches.
Any ideas of how to improve or eliminate this? Thanks.
Very often we will double or triple batch and we are more likely to have this happen on the second or third batch of the run, but not necessarily. Brewers are careful to rinse underneath the mash tun and flush out debris between runs. We have tried adding rice hulls to the mash tun before adding the rye which seems to have slightly improved our failure rate but has not eliminated it altogether. We will mash out this beer since we are going for something fairly medium-full bodied and trying to preserve attenuation profile. During mash out we usually have to spin with our rake at a pretty fast speed to keep temperature uniform, we theorized that we might be grinding malt (or rye) dust into the screen during this mash out process. We have other beers we make via a very similar process with no issues, so I assume it's the rye. This issue happens maybe every 3-5 batches.
Any ideas of how to improve or eliminate this? Thanks.
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