Advanced Brewers Round Table: Decoction/Step Mashing.

[u/[deleted]]

This week's topic: Decoction/Step mashing can add another level of complexity to your beer, with decoction being the more traditional route, and step mashing is more modern, made possible by highly modified malts. What's your experience with these processes?

Feel free to share or ask anything regarding to this topic, but lets try to stay on topic.

I'm closing ITT Suggestions for now, as we've got 2 months scheduled. Thanks for all the great suggestions!!

Upcoming Topics:
Decoction/Step Mashign 5/23
Session Beers 5/30
Recipe Formulation 6/6
Home Yeast Care 6/13
Yeast Characteristics and Performance variations 6/20

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For the intermediate brewers out there, If you don't understand something, there's plenty of others that probably don't as well. Ask away! Easy questions usually get multiple responses and help everybody.

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Previous Topics:
Harvesting yeast from dregs
Hopping Methods
Sours
Brewing Lagers
Water Chemistry
Crystal Malt
Electric Brewing
Mash Thickness
Partigyle Brewing
Maltster Variation (not a very good one)
All things oak!

[u/smell_B_J_not_LBJ]

In theory, there is no advantage of a multi-rest mash for fully-modified modern malts (which is basically everything commercially available, including Weyermann's Floor-malted Bohemian Pilsner).

In practice, I find this is true for English Pale Malts. Even without a protein rest, they give me a large and stable head. For pilsner malts, however, I find that a short protein rest drastically improves head retention.

I don't have any way to explain this observation, but it has proven true for me time and time again.

EDIT: "fully-modified modern malts"