Decoctions

Most of Bach's keyboard music still only sounds right to me if Glen Gould is playing it, even though the gurgling he makes under his breath sounds like a sick dog. My understanding is that this conservatism on my part is a psychological phenomenon by which we cling to our first impression or introduction to a thing, or something. There's nothing we can do about it. If you pick up a CD of Gould's at age 18, you're doomed to find yourself still listening to it 30 years later whether you want to or not. Schiff just sounds kind of funny and you wonder "where's the humming?"

Likewise, when I first started making beer straight from grain, I bought Greg Noonan's book on brewing lager beer, and after I'd puzzled my way through it, I was of course a confirmed decoction masher, following the regimen of four rests achieved by removing and boiling thin or thick portions of the mash. It's difficult, time-consuming, and messy, but that's probably what makes it the right thing to do. And it's how the Germans do it.

Now, the thing is, you can't read anybody else's book without running into the assertion that with modern malts, all this is unnecessary - a single rest at 150 degrees or thereabout will do it. Still though, I've remained a decoction masher for years. You'd hate to make a mistake and have to throw out the whole thing, and that's what so often occurs when you follow haphazard advice about modern anything, isn't it? And how do the Germans do it again?

This is what makes yesterday something of a revolution in my career - my first single step mash. And damned if it didn't work. At least it appears to have, and I got about the same conversion I'm used to - from 11 pounds of grain I got 1.060 original gravities. Others do better, I know, but that's par for my kitchen. So now, with this apparently successful experiment, I have to wonder if perhaps I should cut back, from 4 decoctions to 3? Actually, I did do a decoction at the end yesterday, to raise the temp to 170 for sparging. Couldn't help myself. Probably some ghostly German whispering in my ear. Well, we'll see what it tastes like.

Here's a photo of a maple seed pod outside our window - I noticed and was impressed by how calm it remained yesterday, throughout the brewing process, even at the knottiest and most fraught points where decoction steps were being skipped.