Copyright 2006: B. United International Inc., All rights reserved.
When describing wheat beer production one distinguishes between various stages of the process: mashing, lautering, boiling, cooling, fermentation and storage. Mashing begins with the crushing of the malt in a grain mill. After immediately adding heated water a so-called mash is produced in the mash tun.
The selection of water temperature in itself is of importance to the subsequent quality of the beer because it activates the enzymes present in the malt which then act on its components. An important objective in doing so is to break down the existing starches into low molecular weight, fermentable sugars. This break down occurs in part mechanically through digestion and in part enzymatically. To this end a mash extract is withdrawn from the mash which is then slowly brought to the boil. This splits open the starch kernels and when the two partial mashes are subsequently recombined, the enzymes of the unboiled mash are able to act more rigorously on the released starch.
This process can be repeated several times depending on the characteristics of the malt or the desired beer quality. Once starch breakdown is complete, the actual mashing process is finished. Sugar is added to the mash and it is then pumped to the so-called lautering tun.
Lautering, or clarification as it is also called, takes place in the so-called lautering tun. This is where, at 76 degrees, the solid components of the mash (spent grains) settle onto the screen at the bottom of the tun. These solid components form a natural
filter bed through which the fluid above, the first wort, is run off. After the first wort has been withdrawn, heated water is poured over the spent grain layer three times to fully remove all sugar (sparging). The fluid as a whole that has run off is called the wort and is transferred to the wort pan for further processing.
The purpose of the boiling process in the wort pan is on the one hand to boil down the wort to the desired extract (original wort), and on the other hand to achieve a certain level of aromatization through the addition of hops.
