Dedicated Grainfather Guide, Problems and Solutions Thread

Australia & New Zealand Homebrewing Forum

Help Support Australia & New Zealand Homebrewing Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
I wouldn't be too worried about that overflow attachment jobbie, I do a lot of low gravity (small grain bill) Berliner Weisse brews where the overflow pipe doesn't push all the way down to the top plate/grain bed, so that little adaptor doesn't do squat on those brews, and I don't have any issues.
 
I have been tossing the top plate on with no o ring and putting a screen over the recurc to stop grain going in the pot.
 
My sparge went without a hitch, I started sparging while the mash runnings were still draining out of the grain quite loudly, and I actually had trouble keeping the water level above the top plate (filling jugs out of the HLT).

I noticed that after about half an hour the wort flowing back into the tun was crystal clear. But after sparging the wort was much cloudier (lifting the grain basket out of the wort as per instructions). It would be nice to transfer crystal clear wort into the boil. Has anyone tried leaving the grain basket in place and redirecting the wort out of the pump into a second vessel while simultaneously sparging by replacing the wort running out the pump with sparge water? I am thinking this would keep the grain bed intact and hopefully you could pump ~28 litres through the grain bed and out into the secondary vessel, all crystal clear. Then this could be pumped/tipped back into the grain father for the boil.

Also, I thought the hot break didn't really settle out while I was cooling the wort after the boil because of the constant circulation. maybe it would settle out more if I ran the wort down the side of the vessel on the opposite side to the pump inlet and maybe a bit slower?. or maybe I could extend the hose so that it does half a coil around the bottom of the vessel, which might create a bit of a whirlpool and get the hot break settled in the middle.

What do you guys think?
 
tugger said:
I have been tossing the top plate on with no o ring and putting a screen over the recurc to stop grain going in the pot.
A tea strainer does the job. Sometimes quite a bit of grain escapes the bottom of the malt pipe and keeps running through the system. It ought to be considered for one of the upgrades.
 
there but for the meddling of wife who helps me brew, go i. i nearly lost the top sliding stem on about my 2nd brew, then i read on here where somebody DID lose one. that one is easily done - upend the cylinder to empty the mash grain and the stem slips off, into the grain never to be seen again. me lucky the wife asked me where it was, and it got retrieved.
i now have a level of paranoia about losing the stem at about the same level as my paranoia about leaving the receiving fermenter tap on when bulk priming. had to get the carpet shampooed after that one.
i feel for you - bugger of a thing to lose cos you can't replace it at kmart or somewhere convenient. you may be able to rig up a temporary thing with 2cm of pvc and some silicon gel, although i don't know how hot wort handles pvc. or cut up a plastic food funnel where the stem meets the cone. don't know about the plastic there either.
hope you post on your replacement experience.

ps.. whoops - didn't see all the other fixes before i submitted this. sorry guys :unsure:
 
Coodgee said:
My sparge went without a hitch, I started sparging while the mash runnings were still draining out of the grain quite loudly, and I actually had trouble keeping the water level above the top plate (filling jugs out of the HLT).

I noticed that after about half an hour the wort flowing back into the tun was crystal clear. But after sparging the wort was much cloudier (lifting the grain basket out of the wort as per instructions). It would be nice to transfer crystal clear wort into the boil. Has anyone tried leaving the grain basket in place and redirecting the wort out of the pump into a second vessel while simultaneously sparging by replacing the wort running out the pump with sparge water? I am thinking this would keep the grain bed intact and hopefully you could pump ~28 litres through the grain bed and out into the secondary vessel, all crystal clear. Then this could be pumped/tipped back into the grain father for the boil.

yeah - how long did the sparge take?? sounds good if you had trouble keeping the water up.

my uninformed question on the clear wort bit is this... my wort overflow is often crystal clear after 1/2 hour. if sparging makes it cloudier (and it does), then (and this is the bit i don't understand), wouldn't the simultaneous sparging still pump cloudy wort into the mix?? where would the separation lie?? i get what you're doing, but i don't understand the science.

to date, i haven't overly worried about whirlpooling the hotbreak. and there is usually a load of debris in the last litre on transfer. i tip the gf through a fine strainer into the fermenter at that point. no liquid lost and not much that didn't go through the chller. by the time it finishes fermenting, i find the rest has pretty much settled into trub.

one point, though - i always leave just enough wort to cover the base of the gf - then hit anything stuck to the floor of the gf with a stainless steel egg lifter. gets it immediately clean without fear of cemented roast grain dust glued to the gf. for some reason, this works, but if you completely empty the gf and then try to clean the floor, it's out with the bi-carb soda and vinegar, and that ain't fun.

if you do go down the whirlpooling transfer and tube thing, pls report - we all on a learning curve with this beast.
 
butisitart said:
yeah - how long did the sparge take?? sounds good if you had trouble keeping the water up.

didn't time it but not long at all. about the time it took to fill my 1 litre jug from the HLT and pour it into the grain father 16 times. About halfway through I realised it would be much quicker to just dunk the jug in the top of the HLT rather than run it out of the HLT tap! I got my grain milled by craftbrewer, it seemed like a pretty average crush, bit of flower but not too fine.



my uninformed question on the clear wort bit is this... my wort overflow is often crystal clear after 1/2 hour. if sparging makes it cloudier (and it does), then (and this is the bit i don't understand), wouldn't the simultaneous sparging still pump cloudy wort into the mix?? where would the separation lie?? i get what you're doing, but i don't understand the science.

what I am suggesting is that I don't lift the grain basket up to sparge. Lifting up the basket seems to disturb the grain bed and sucks through a heap of particles. If I just leave the grain bed where it is and redirect the pump outlet into a third vessel I should be able to maintain the filtration properties of the grain bed. So I will replace the recirculating wort with sparge water and it should flow through the grain bed and come out of the pump outlet all nice and filtered. It might get a bit dirty for the last few litres but I am thinking it would be an improvement in wort clarify going into the kettle.


to date, i haven't overly worried about whirlpooling the hotbreak. and there is usually a load of debris in the last litre on transfer. i tip the gf through a fine strainer into the fermenter at that point. no liquid lost and not much that didn't go through the chller. by the time it finishes fermenting, i find the rest has pretty much settled into trub.

are your beers turning out nice and clear? I have a bit of a personal goal to try to get nice clean clear wort going into the fermenter, I feel like it will produce better pils, ESBs etc. My first beer was a wheat hopped with galaxy so I don't really care too much about clarity obviously but the next one I do is going to be a pils with california lager yeast so there will be nowhere for haze and off flavours to hide. Trying to take my brewing to the next level this time around!!

one point, though - i always leave just enough wort to cover the base of the gf - then hit anything stuck to the floor of the gf with a stainless steel egg lifter. gets it immediately clean without fear of cemented roast grain dust glued to the gf. for some reason, this works, but if you completely empty the gf and then try to clean the floor, it's out with the bi-carb soda and vinegar, and that ain't fun.

I noted the instructions say to give the bottom of the vessel a scrape with a mash paddle a few times during the boil, but I don't have such a paddle yet. I find a stainless serving spoon from the kitchen makes a pretty good mash paddle but not for scraping the bottom of the vessel. no issues on clean up though and the boil rolled nicely.

if you do go down the whirlpooling transfer and tube thing, pls report - we all on a learning curve with this beast.

I'm going to try the alternative sparge method next brew for sure. I even have a spare urn coming soon so I can heat the runnings while I sparge. I'll be sure to report all results. I'm tempted to brew tonight but I can see myself going to bed at 1am. maybe if I can get home from work by 5pm and mash in by 5:30... mmmm...
 
Coodgee said:
My sparge went without a hitch, I started sparging while the mash runnings were still draining out of the grain quite loudly, and I actually had trouble keeping the water level above the top plate (filling jugs out of the HLT).

I noticed that after about half an hour the wort flowing back into the tun was crystal clear. But after sparging the wort was much cloudier (lifting the grain basket out of the wort as per instructions). It would be nice to transfer crystal clear wort into the boil. Has anyone tried leaving the grain basket in place and redirecting the wort out of the pump into a second vessel while simultaneously sparging by replacing the wort running out the pump with sparge water? I am thinking this would keep the grain bed intact and hopefully you could pump ~28 litres through the grain bed and out into the secondary vessel, all crystal clear. Then this could be pumped/tipped back into the grain father for the boil.

Also, I thought the hot break didn't really settle out while I was cooling the wort after the boil because of the constant circulation. maybe it would settle out more if I ran the wort down the side of the vessel on the opposite side to the pump inlet and maybe a bit slower?. or maybe I could extend the hose so that it does half a coil around the bottom of the vessel, which might create a bit of a whirlpool and get the hot break settled in the middle.

What do you guys think?
If you feel the need to clear the wort for some reason, then consider recirculating through the pump and into a Hop Spider while you're bringing it up to the boil. That'll do it.

Martin
 
Hi Martin, didn't realise a hop spider would provide that level of filtration. I have been thinking of getting one anyway so I might give that a go. Are you suggesting that clearing the wort is unnecessary or undesirable? It's fairly common practice I would have thought, with a 3V system a lot of people will routinely recirculate the first runnings until it clears up, for instance.
 
Us old BIAB'ers haven't worried about clear wort into the fermenter in ages. It all settles out over time anyway, especially if you're using whirlfoc or similar in the boil.

I noticed my wort is much more clear since I started using the Grainfather, but I haven't noticed any difference in the quality or clarity of the end beer.
 
Coodgee said:
Hi Martin, didn't realise a hop spider would provide that level of filtration. I have been thinking of getting one anyway so I might give that a go. Are you suggesting that clearing the wort is unnecessary or undesirable? It's fairly common practice I would have thought, with a 3V system a lot of people will routinely recirculate the first runnings until it clears up, for instance.
They're fine enough to remove a lot of the debris that is visible. You'll see what I mean when you see it.

I couldn't be arsed personally, but for some folk, it's a point of pride or something.
 
I'm thinking about adding a hop spider to my brewing arsenal - to replace hop socks (because I hate cleaning them, and like the idea that it's easier to dump every boil/steep hop addition into a single spider without fiddling about. Plus people seem to suggest it holds more debris than socks.

But what do hop spider users do when dry hopping?
 
There's a grainfather blog article i believe where they did side by side brews of clear wort versus wort with some trub in it. The fermentation with trub produced the overall better tasting beer in blind testing. I don't think it's important to have crystal clear wort going into the fermenter and it could actually be detrimental to the final product. If you want fine beers, temp control through fermentation and having patience I believe play a far more significant role. Just my $0.02

Here's the experiment article: http://www.grainfather.com/#!weekly-mash/cetx/post/4097066291833008005
 
kaiserben said:
I'm thinking about adding a hop spider to my brewing arsenal - to replace hop socks (because I hate cleaning them, and like the idea that it's easier to dump every boil/steep hop addition into a single spider without fiddling about. Plus people seem to suggest it holds more debris than socks.

But what do hop spider users do when dry hopping?
Still a hop sock for dry hopping for me, although I did buy some stainless tea strainer ball thingies which I must get around to using at some stage.
 
rawlus said:
There's a grainfather blog article i believe where they did side by side brews of clear wort versus wort with some trub in it. The fermentation with trub produced the overall better tasting beer in blind testing. I don't think it's important to have crystal clear wort going into the fermenter and it could actually be detrimental to the final product. If you want fine beers, temp control through fermentation and having patience I believe play a far more significant role. Just my $0.02

Here's the experiment article: http://www.grainfather.com/#!weekly-mash/cetx/post/4097066291833008005
that's very interesting. certainly strong evidence in favour of tranfering plenty of trub!
 
lots of food for thought here coodgee et al. thanks for all your explanation. especially the separation bit.
without having done it, but it sounds pretty tempting as an experiment, is the pump through hopspider. sounds logical and easy. and yep - hopspider stops pretty much everything down to 200-300 microns. i assume you then rinse the spider and you're ready to throw hops at it on the boil. cool.
going with rawlus (above), my brews always clear (to my satisfaction) on a 2week rest in the fermenter. only ever used finings on the first brew i made. but - personal preference. if i want a really clear ale, i just go the saf-04. not overly scientific, but it works. and i like the big flavour of uncleansed beer. bit like ladies who don't shave their armpits. perfickly natural and the sort of thing only real men appreciate.
i wonder if a fixation on clear beer is something we've gotten used to through sanitised corporate brewing. like getting milk from the woolies fridge instead of a cow. nothing to do with the real deal.

but the pump through spider sounds pretty labour free - so i'll give it an experimental whirl in my next pale brew just to see how much comes through, and how it tastes and looks at the other end.
 
kaiserben said:
But what do hop spider users do when dry hopping?
Hi Guys, I'm a newbie here, not sure what links we can post but I use stainless dry hop filter canisters tied to the lid of my kegs - basically a mini hop spider with a screw on lid ... I imported them from a place in Utah

cheers

Wazza
 
Back
Top