I tried brewing my first all-grain beer batch the other day. I used an old cooler with some window screen material we had lying around. Using John Palmer's book, How to Brew, as a guide, I used 162 degree strike water. Even though I rinsed out the cooler with hot water first (OK it wasn't boiling like he said) the mash temp came out too low so I was forced to add lots of hotter water to get the temp up. I'm guessing it averaged about 151. I was shooting for 152. But the wort came out tasting nice and sweet so I should be OK, even though the grain bed was on the soggy side.
This all got me to thinking what the ideal mash temp should be. So I used Google searches for mash temps and counted the results. See the graph above. In the search labeled "mash temp" "great beer" I searched for a range of temperatures, the actual searches were "mash temp 151" "great beer", "mash temp 152" "great beer", etc and plotted the number of hits. You should only look at the relative popularity within a single category since the scaling between search terms is arbitrary.The blue line is just a search for "mash temp" with all the temperatures. There were way more results for that so I had to divide the number of hits by forty to scale it to fit the chart. Obviously, there is a lot of noise in the data.So what does it all show? First, nobody uses odd temperatures. Second, the three most popular mash temperatures are 150, 152 and 154. If you want a great beer, use 152. For the best beer use 154. For a beer that is neither a "great beer" nor a "best beer," use 150. Then again, maybe it doesn't mean anything at all. You'll just have to try it out for yourself.
