A Guide To All-grain Brewing In A Bag

[RdeVjun]

Quite right TB, I should've mentioned that there's limits! Whiz it in the blender or coffee grinder just enough to minimise the amount of whole grain is what I'd be aiming for, there's no need to turn it all into dust and there's probably a point of diminishing returns.

As an aside, I remember doing a partial back in the bad old days with a couple of kilos of base malt that was milled with a rolling pin on the kitchen table. Not a fun job but once I got the hang of it, pretty easy and I had a reasonably efficient process happening. Wholesome aerobic exercise it was, but rather tedious. IIRC, the beer was quite OK, I was just glad I didn't have to mill 4 or 5 kilos...

 

[black_labb]

thanks everyone. it should work well as long as i ensure the grains circulate in the blender so i dont get 1/4 into flour and the rest untouched.

 

[Bribie G]

Last year as an experiment Rosscoe Junior at CraftBrewer kindly double milled a batch of base malt for my BIAB brews and honestly I didn't notice any diff in efficiency. I'm tending to the advice to do a couple of mid mash stirs instead.

 

[Nick JD]

I turn it to molecules with my Point Grinder 1.0

Poor little thing has had over 75kg of grain through it. Still going, but has a few chips out of the lid - probably from bloody stones/grit/crap in the grain).

It takes me about 3 minutes to mill a kg, and I wipe the dust from under it every 1kg (think the dust getting into the cooling vents not so good).

I've stopped sparging these days because for the extra tiny efficiency it's not worth the hassle when I'm already getting > 75%.

If I did 50L batches I'd get both a grain mill ... and some good health insurance for my liver.

 

[MarkBastard]

I got about 70% efficiency last time so I too won't bother looking into sparging or mash outs.

I don't really have anything to tie the bag to for draining and don't want to use a pulley system so I've been just dumping the bag into my 19L Big W pot for draining. I'm thinking of sitting a cake rack in the pot and then sitting the bag on the cake rack so that the wort just drains out of the bag and I can empty the extra wort back into the urn. Anyone done this?

 

[argon]

I got about 70% efficiency last time so I too won't bother looking into sparging or mash outs.

I don't really have anything to tie the bag to for draining and don't want to use a pulley system so I've been just dumping the bag into my 19L Big W pot for draining. I'm thinking of sitting a cake rack in the pot and then sitting the bag on the cake rack so that the wort just drains out of the bag and I can empty the extra wort back into the urn. Anyone done this?

MB not a bad idea... I think I read a post not long ago about someone using a colender over a bucket to let it drain. I'm getting pretty sick of squeezing the bag out when I pull it out of the kettle. Probably worst part of Biab for me. So I reckon I'll do the cake rack/ collender method over the 19L pot next brew day. See how my efficiencies work out. I do double batches and get 70% at the moment. So next single I do I'll give this a shot and see how the numbers stack up.

 

[MarkBastard]

Yeah the squeezing thing is annoying for sure. At the moment I lift the bag, which can be hard if the urn is sitting on a bench, and then I drain it mostly and then just chuck it in the pot and then put the urn up to 110 degrees and put the lid on.

Then I go to squeezing mode. I have some thick black 'general purpose' rubber gloves that I use to squeeze. I do a good squeeze every 5-10 minutes or so while the mash is coming to the boil. If I could just let it sit there and drain it'd be so much easier without a doubt!

 

[Thirsty Boy]

hang it off a door handle - you toss it in teh pot you currently put it in, sit it next to a door - raise it so its off the bottom of the pot and tie it off on teh door handle. Then it drains perfectly well.

If you look in the BIAB guide that is in teh #1 post of this thread (say thank you nicely to PP) you will in fact see a picture of exactly what I am talking about. You have a door handle somewhere in your house surely??

Or substitute whatever protrusion from a vertical surface you can find that is a few feet off the floor.

 

[black_labb]

i just put it into a colander over a pot or something big enough to catch the drips. just trying to squeeze it into the colander gets most of the liquid out. i got a reasonably sized colander to cover the element in the urn that i use (once i've fished it out of the wort)

 

[MarkBastard]

Yeah I probably have a door handle somewhere but not anywhere near where I brew. I could probably hang it off the vice on my work bench though.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Yeah I probably have a door handle somewhere but not anywhere near where I brew. I could probably hang it off the vice on my work bench though.

There you go - I am always of the opinion that one less bit of stuff you need for BIAB is an improvement. So no colander is better than needing one by definition.

I don't insist that this is the universal truth - but I find that the bag drains more quickly and more completely if it is hanging, than if it is sitting in a colander type arrangement. Also (IMO) easier to give it a quick squeeze when its hanging then sitting. I don't squeeze the hell out of it though, spin the bag to tighten it up and give it a bit of a squeeze, takes all of 20 seconds.

 

[Bribie G]

I'm moving in 3 weeks and don't think I have a roof hatch available in the new brewery (double garage, yay) to put a bar across to hang the pulley from, so I'm thinking of just using a stud finder and putting a fairly substantial eye-bolt in the ceiling, and a cleat in the wall for the hoisting cord. If and when we move out, spakfill and a lick of paint over the top and you wouldn't know.

 

[Paul H]

I'm moving in 3 weeks and don't think I have a roof hatch available in the new brewery (double garage, yay) to put a bar across to hang the pulley from, so I'm thinking of just using a stud finder and putting a fairly substantial eye-bolt in the ceiling, and a cleat in the wall for the hoisting cord. If and when we move out, spakfill and a lick of paint over the top and you wouldn't know.

Or you could just brew like the rest off us


:icon_cheers:

Paul

 

[Bribie G]

You mean like the diminishing majority ?

 

[MarkBastard]

There you go - I am always of the opinion that one less bit of stuff you need for BIAB is an improvement. So no colander is better than needing one by definition.

I don't insist that this is the universal truth - but I find that the bag drains more quickly and more completely if it is hanging, than if it is sitting in a colander type arrangement. Also (IMO) easier to give it a quick squeeze when its hanging then sitting. I don't squeeze the hell out of it though, spin the bag to tighten it up and give it a bit of a squeeze, takes all of 20 seconds.

I find that you have to wait as well as squeeze, and possibly squeeze multiple times.

There's the wort that's trapped in the bag in the middle of the grain that tries to come out and is helped by the initial draining and squeezing. But then after 5 minutes there's more of that too I guess from the actual grain shedding liquid.

Even if I sit my bag, fully drained, in my buckets and leave it for 10 minutes, I can come back, lift the bag, and there's probably another 500ml sitting in the bottom.

So yeah I agree draining would be ideal as I don't think it's something that can be rushed.

 

[felten]

I tried the blender out and didn't like it, too many whole grains left after each batch. So I switched to a small coffee grinder and that seemed to do the job better, although they both produced a lot of flour and half grain size particles

 

[PistolPatch]

After spending the last two years or so trying to create an information site for BIABrewer.info and, at every turn finding this harder and harder, just last week everything became simple. I went around to NME's last weekend and all is brilliant now. It is so easy!

LOL! That only took two months of hardly any sleep

BIABrewer.info is now a reality. It is not in the format I originally imagined (better format now) and has taken far more effort (about a thousand times more) than I imagined.

There is a lot of great/new stuff there but not as much as I had hoped for. We will get there though. I am quite disappointed in "The Commentary" but it is still, I am ashamed to say, a huge improvement on previous versions.

I've been working on the above, just today, since 6 am so can I do a little PP post?...

Squeezing the Bag etc

I only have one question here. What is the point of squeezing/draining the bag so much?

It will not promote further enzyme activity. All it will do is give you a tad more sweet liquor (wort.) So. why is there so much discussion on this? The reason is because new brewers get hung up on other brewer's efficiency without even knowing what the other brewer is even referring to. (Often the original brewer doesn't even know what they are quoting!)

BIAB gives better efficiency on even a gentle squeeze than batch-sparging but less than fly-sparging.

BIAB brewers and new all-grain brewers generally should not be so focussed on, "draining the grain." so much. It is usually only an economy measure relevant more to big breweries. And, it is actually impossible to determine your efficiency after one brew. This is an ugly but true fact of home brewing.

Home brewers often talk about efficiency which is a factor in which they, in reality, have little control over.

So, the real point should be when is the most practical time to stop squeezing and draining your bag?

Batch-spargers and fly-spargers know that at some point you have to begin the boil. A sensible traditional brewer knows that they can let their mash tun drain into the kettle all the way through the boil. This is stupid though - all it does is increase an efficiency figure which we can replicate in BIAB quite easily.

At some point a Traditional Brewer will cut the supply from their MLT. A sensible time to do this is at Boil Start.

I think a bag should never be squeezed more than three times simply because it is a waste of effort. Wort drainage from the bag should also be done at Boil Start or prior - no later.

That is my late night thought for today
Pat

 

[Hashie]

LOL! That only took two months of hardly any sleep

BIABrewer.info is now a reality. It is not in the format I originally imagined (better format now) and has taken far more effort (about a thousand times more) than I imagined.

There is a lot of great/new stuff there but not as much as I had hoped for. We will get there though. I am quite disappointed in "The Commentary" but it is still, I am ashamed to say, a huge improvement on previous versions.

I've been working on the above, just today, since 6 am so can I do a little PP post?...

That's a top looking website pistolpatch, top work.

 

[PistolPatch]

A heap of guys have worked on it behind the scenes for ages. God bless those brewers .

I'm off to the Red Bull Air Race. Cool!

 

[Bribie G]

Watch you don't get taken out by a stray Brazilian Pilot :blink:
The new BIAB site is looking great and should start picking up members shortly.

On topic, one thing I should point out is that with a larger grain bill mashed in a restricted space (eg 6kg mashed in a 40L urn) because the spent grain removes a fair whack of the initial strike liquor then this can affect the pre boil volume. A three vessel brewer can just keep sparging till they get their volume but in the case of bigger bills I find I need to do a top up, especiallya 90 min boil. So I put that in at the beginning with a sparge in a bag if necessary, get a wee bit more efficiency.