Another first all grain post...

[rossbaker]

Well, it's been a long time coming. After brewing extract for a few years and slowly acumulating the gear I need for full size biab I did the first one yesterday. I had a mate come over from Geelong who also brews and was curious to see how it all works. It was a pretty chaotic and disorganized affair but at the end of the day I have a full cube of Dr S's golden ale which tastes and smells awesome. I will try to pitch and ferment at some stage today.

Some points/questions:

- my keggle has 5l of dead space below the tap. Does anyone see this as much of an issue? I ended up tipping it on an angle and draining most of the 'dead space' wort into the cube anyway.

- I forgot to buy whirlfloc and didn't end up using any clarifying agent. I am thinking that I could just see how well it clears up when cold crashing and add gelatin to the keg if need be.

- mash time... Well this is probably where I deviated the most from best practice. Once we had mashed in and wrapped it all up in a blanket I had the bright idea that we should piss off to the local brewery (bad shepherd) for lunch and drinks. As I should have known, we ended up staying longer than expected and I think the final mash time was about 2 1/2 hours. There was a fair amount of temp loss - it got down to about 60 deg - so I just left the grain in while I ramped the temp up to mash out temp then pulled it out and did the drain in a bucket hanging from a door handle trick. The pre boil gravity was 1040 so not too bad?

- I also had a bit of trouble with the grain mill, which is a second hand keg king two roller job. I was aiming for a fine crush so I had it set to about 1mm. It really struggled with this setting and would grind nicely for a few seconds then 'slip' and just spin without feeding any grain through. In the end, I fed it all through twice and I was happy with the crush. Is this common with the cheaper two roller mills?

- the gas bottle (which was full to start with) feels like I chewed through a fair bit. It was my first time using this burner - a high pressure one from keg King. I used hot water from the kitchen for my strike water so I not think I wasted too much gas getting to mash temps. Hopefully I can figure out how to get this working a bit more efficiently. How many brews do most folks get out of gas bottle?

Despite the few hiccups I am pretty happy with it all. Because it is a long weekend, I figured that I would be keen to brew again so I thought ahead and I already have the grain bill for the rye variation of the Dr S GA ready to go. I reckon I'll do that later today or tomorrow and try to keep things a bit more organised. I well and truly have the bug now!

 

[Beamer]

Welcome to the world if BIAB no looking back now.

I have only been doing BIAB for four months so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Mash time will be fine, im playing with 60-90 minute mashes. From what I have read there isn't much conversion after 90 minutes.

Thats a good sg alot better than my first few goes.

I havent had any problems with my grainmill, but I bought it new and run it at .6mm

Cant help witb gas sorry I use an electric urn.

Im sure youll enjoy your first all grain beer more than the lunch time ones at the bad sheperd.

Cheers,
Beamer

 

[wynnum1]

How big is your gas bottle the strike water could be heated using electricity and over the side heater could be used to bring the temperature up to boiling. and then use gas.

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

Some points/questions:

- my keggle has 5l of dead space below the tap. Does anyone see this as much of an issue? I ended up tipping it on an angle and draining most of the 'dead space' wort into the cube anyway. Thats a lot of dead space.

- I forgot to buy whirlfloc and didn't end up using any clarifying agent. I am thinking that I could just see how well it clears up when cold crashing and add gelatin to the keg if need be. Forget things like whirflock, gelatin etc...you have much to learn before you need to worry about using these

- mash time... Well this is probably where I deviated the most from best practice. Once we had mashed in and wrapped it all up in a blanket I had the bright idea that we should piss off to the local brewery (bad shepherd) for lunch and drinks. As I should have known, we ended up staying longer than expected and I think the final mash time was about 2 1/2 hours. There was a fair amount of temp loss - it got down to about 60 deg - so I just left the grain in while I ramped the temp up to mash out temp then pulled it out and did the drain in a bucket hanging from a door handle trick. The pre boil gravity was 1040 so not too bad? Long mash isnt an issue. Its the first 45m that are critical for conversion.You would have been better to add boiling water to your mash to help sparging ( and do a basic mash-out step for those who beleive mash-out is essential ). Temp ramp for mash out is not all that necessary as is mashout

- I also had a bit of trouble with the grain mill, which is a second hand keg king two roller job. I was aiming for a fine crush so I had it set to about 1mm. It really struggled with this setting and would grind nicely for a few seconds then 'slip' and just spin without feeding any grain through. In the end, I fed it all through twice and I was happy with the crush. Is this common with the cheaper two roller mills? Try grain wetting/moistening/conditioning. This helps a lot with 2 roller mills. You will need to play with your mill gap settings

- the gas bottle (which was full to start with) feels like I chewed through a fair bit. It was my first time using this burner - a high pressure one from keg King. I used hot water from the kitchen for my strike water so I not think I wasted too much gas getting to mash temps. Hopefully I can figure out how to get this working a bit more efficiently. How many brews do most folks get out of gas bottle? You should get more than 1

Despite the few hiccups I am pretty happy with it all. Because it is a long weekend, I figured that I would be keen to brew again so I thought ahead and I already have the grain bill for the rye variation of the Dr S GA ready to go. I reckon I'll do that later today or tomorrow and try to keep things a bit more organised. I well and truly have the bug now! I would avoid RYE until you have a few brews under your belt. RYE will bring even the most experienced brewer to tears

 

[rossbaker]

How big is your gas bottle the strike water could be heated using electricity and over the side heater could be used to bring the temperature up to boiling. and then use gas.

Gas bottle is a standard 9kg. Funnily enough, I filled the strike water up 5L at a time with hot water from the kitchen sink. My hot water is very hot and I turned the burner on as soon as the first 5L was in the keggle. By the time I put the last couple of litres in, I had almost overshot my strike temp so I don't think I used very much gas heating up the strike water. I will have to double check my connections and make sure that I have enough oxygen getting in. I just noticed that the stated fuel consumption rate on the keg king website is between 0.5 and 4.5 kg per hour so I will need to make sure I am not being wasteful!

I had previously considered using an over the side element - might look into this further as well.

 

[rossbaker]

Some points/questions:

- my keggle has 5l of dead space below the tap. Does anyone see this as much of an issue? I ended up tipping it on an angle and draining most of the 'dead space' wort into the cube anyway. Thats a lot of dead space.

- I forgot to buy whirlfloc and didn't end up using any clarifying agent. I am thinking that I could just see how well it clears up when cold crashing and add gelatin to the keg if need be. Forget things like whirflock, gelatin etc...you have much to learn before you need to worry about using these

- mash time... Well this is probably where I deviated the most from best practice. Once we had mashed in and wrapped it all up in a blanket I had the bright idea that we should piss off to the local brewery (bad shepherd) for lunch and drinks. As I should have known, we ended up staying longer than expected and I think the final mash time was about 2 1/2 hours. There was a fair amount of temp loss - it got down to about 60 deg - so I just left the grain in while I ramped the temp up to mash out temp then pulled it out and did the drain in a bucket hanging from a door handle trick. The pre boil gravity was 1040 so not too bad? Long mash isnt an issue. Its the first 45m that are critical for conversion.You would have been better to add boiling water to your mash to help sparging ( and do a basic mash-out step for those who beleive mash-out is essential ). Temp ramp for mash out is not all that necessary as is mashout

- I also had a bit of trouble with the grain mill, which is a second hand keg king two roller job. I was aiming for a fine crush so I had it set to about 1mm. It really struggled with this setting and would grind nicely for a few seconds then 'slip' and just spin without feeding any grain through. In the end, I fed it all through twice and I was happy with the crush. Is this common with the cheaper two roller mills? Try grain wetting/moistening/conditioning. This helps a lot with 2 roller mills. You will need to play with your mill gap settings

- the gas bottle (which was full to start with) feels like I chewed through a fair bit. It was my first time using this burner - a high pressure one from keg King. I used hot water from the kitchen for my strike water so I not think I wasted too much gas getting to mash temps. Hopefully I can figure out how to get this working a bit more efficiently. How many brews do most folks get out of gas bottle? You should get more than 1

Despite the few hiccups I am pretty happy with it all. Because it is a long weekend, I figured that I would be keen to brew again so I thought ahead and I already have the grain bill for the rye variation of the Dr S GA ready to go. I reckon I'll do that later today or tomorrow and try to keep things a bit more organised. I well and truly have the bug now! I would avoid RYE until you have a few brews under your belt. RYE will bring even the most experienced brewer to tears

Thanks for the feedback mate. I will look at grain wetting next brew. Thanks also for the heads up r.e. rye. I had no idea that it could be tricky to work with. As I already have the grain bill for the golden ale and it is all mixed in one bag I will see it through this weekend and hopefully learn a few things from it. I saw in the recipe notes for Dr S's GA that he recommends subbing the wheat for rye which is about 20% of the recipe. Any tips??

 

[hobospy]

Despite the few hiccups I am pretty happy with it all. Because it is a long weekend, I figured that I would be keen to brew again so I thought ahead and I already have the grain bill for the rye variation of the Dr S GA ready to go. I reckon I'll do that later today or tomorrow and try to keep things a bit more organised. I well and truly have the bug now! I would avoid RYE until you have a few brews under your belt. RYE will bring even the most experienced brewer to tears

I can attest to this, I'm no expert by any means but I have done a few brews now. I foolishly attempted to brew a rye beer on a school night and instead of the usual and planned 5 hours it took closer to 10. I didn't get to finish until well past 2:00 am and not only had to wash rye wort from the outside of my urn and the kitchen floor but also the kitchen cabinets, sink, window, walls and ceiling ...... I had to drive to Melbourne that same morning ...... I dubbed the beer Devil Beer and will not be venturing to the rye side again any time soon

 

[Droopy Brew]

One point I would make is avoid using tap hot water- it goes through your hot water system and can pick up a lot of ****.

Congrats on your first AG- it is a proud moment. I personally haven't experienced issues using Rye and love the stuff. Don't be too afraid- start with 10% and grab a few handfulls of rice hulls to throw in the mash and you'll be sweet. The Rye DSGA is the ****.

 

[rossbaker]

Thanks guys. Luckily the rye brew was pretty successful. My mill worked no problems this time. I went with a pretty fine crush and I think that using a runny mash with biab seems to help avoid other problems. Pre and post boil gravitiess were just under the last batch but after recalibrating my measuring stick I think I had a bit more strike water on the second batch.

Only potential stuff up was that I used Chinook and even though I altered the hop schedule for no chill, I think this one will end up a bit too bitter.

What to brew next though??

 

[rossbaker]

What specific problems are people talking about when they mention rye being tricky to work with?

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

What specific problems are people talking about when they mention rye being tricky to work with?

Try sparging perkins paste. it would be easier

 

[rossbaker]

Try sparging perkins paste. it would be easier

Aha. Luckily not an issue with biab and a lower gravity wort.