German Brewing

I would assume it to be campden with Nameta since that's what we recommend.

It's there now. Hopefully the context with SMB is adequate to avoid confusion with K-meta Campden tablets.

I have a 3 vessel setup and heat all my water at once. Pull in the mash water which I want to under let and then the left over water is used to heat the HERMS coil and then for sparge.

How should I add the SMB. My plan was to boil the water, cool through my plate chiller add SMB and then do the process, but how much SMB for my 20 gallons of starting water. A portion is technical the mash water and the rest is sparge.

Do I calculate how much mash water I will pull I.e 8 gallons (X amount of SMB) and then add SMB to treat to 12 gallons of sparge reservoir portion? Can I add it all at once.

Thank you for any guidance!

I would suppose that you could add the SMB under the mash and underlet the grain-in. Then add the smaller sparge dose to the remaining sparge liquor. I am just not sure how quickly the SMB saturates and is effective in the mash water in this instance. Perhaps underletting slowly might increase the effectiveness with this process. I always treat my mash and sparge water differently with minerals anyway - so I treat both volumes seperately.

So if you know your target strike water, dose for that into the dry mash kettle, adding the false bottom and dry grist on top. Reserve the sparge water and dose that at the lower rate and return it under the mash water level.

Smarter people than me are here can probably shoot holes in that.

I have 20 gallon blichmanns and no real Cap solution yet (17.5"diameter) I would have the lid on and would recirculate under the liquid level. is that enough protection along with the SMB?

I think a better idea would be to forgo underletting the grain and just treating the mash water first and minimize splashing going in. I would be worried that the time it takes as I underlet the grain and before the SMB is dissolved would oxidize the grain, or would that be the best option.

if I do it that way, I can then just add the sparge dose to the HLT right before the sparge.

If you no sparge, do you use the Mash water dosage for the whole mash volume?

I could no sparge with my setup, but haven't before, so will have to accept the variable efficiency and guess.