Guide A Newbie

[Whistlingjack]

So, I heat the liquor to the required temp and tip it into the mash tun at a proportion of 2.5litres per kilo of grain. Tip the grain in and stir.

Wait 60 minutes. Then what?

Drain off some liquid to the fermenter?

Then add more heated water? How much?

Forgive these questions, just "going it alone"

 

[goatherder]

Have you read John Palmers "How to Brew"?

There's a free online version at:

http://www.howtobrew.com/

It answers these questions while stepping you through the whole process. It's a great resource, give it a look.

Best of luck with your first brew, it's heaps of fun.

 

[Tony]

first bit is right, mash for 60 min at about 66 deg. cooler for a drier beer ,hotter for a malty beer.

run the liquid into a boiling vesel and then sparge the grain with 76 deg hot waret till your requried volunme is met.

boil with hops depending on beer stylke for 6o min or so.

cool to 20 deg or less and pitch yeast.

if your not sure read mate.

get the plamer book, get promash and get asking lots of questions on here.

best way yo learn.

question for you?????

what style of beer are you looking at brewing, we an help with recipes and methods for what you want.

cheers

 

[Whistlingjack]

Thanks for the reply.

I have read Palmers online book, but I'm still not sure about the process.

So, I drain off the wort after 60 minutes, then add more hot water? How much and for how long do I let it stand?

 

[Whistlingjack]

I want to brew a hefeweizen.

 

[Whistlingjack]

So, after I have let off the first "runnings" into the boiler, I add more hot water to the tun.

How much?

Then I drain it into the boiler?

 

[Whistlingjack]

I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed. Give me a hint?

 

[goatherder]

Roughly it goes like this:

You will have liquid losses in your brew. These consist of:

Water soaked up by the grain and not released - roughly 1litre/kg grain
Mashtun dead space (water you can't drain out due to tap position) - varies with equipment
Kettle evaporation losses - varies, but a starting point is 10% per hour of boiling
Kettle trub losses - liquid left in the kettle after you drain which contains all the trub and hop matter. Again, this varies.

You need to know what these losses are going to be. Do some estimates based on your equipment.

Now, when you mash in, you generally choose a water:grist ratio to do so. This is generally between 2:1 and 3:1. Don't sweat this too much as a newbie, just pick one and stick with it.

And you need to know how much beer you want to make in the end - base this on your fermenter size (eg, 23l for a 25l fermenter).

So your water equation will be:

Final Volume = mashin water + sparge water - total losses

which expands to:

Final Fermenter Volume = ((water:grist ratio) x (amount of grain in kg)) + (Sparge water) - (kg of grain) - (mashtun deadspace) - (kettle evaporation losses) - (kettle losses).

This looks daunting, but it's just simple arithmetic. Estimate what your losses will be, plug them in and your sparge water volume will fall out.

Like Tony said, grab a copy of Promash (or Beersmith) and the software will do all these calcs for you.

 

[arsenewenger]

Howdy Whistling Jack try reading this from Pat , it helps alot
Cheers
TK

Howdy Guys,

Heres the notes on batch sparging as Ive learned from Ross. Have also included mashing as that can be a little daunting as well. One thing that will make this easier to understand is to read each step slowly and then imagine yourself carrying that step out. (Can you tell I lectured on thinking techniques for 14 years?!!!)

It will still probably take a few reads to make sense especially as a lot of us have been conditioned to think its difficult. Let me know if anything does/doesnt make sense. Id post it to AHB but I get scared of writing long posts when Im sober LOL!

Cheers

Pat

Why Batch Sparge?

Batch sparging is simple. It requires no complex equipment and very little monitoring compared with fly sparging. From what I gather, the only advantage of fly sparging is a slight increase in brewhouse efficiency. In other words, youll need a tad more grain for batch sparging to produce the same original gravity. So batch sparging may cost you a dollar extra in grain.



How to Batch Sparge

1. Find a Recipe and Order the Grain Bill: Rosss Scwartzbier that we did on Wednesday had the following grain bill in the recipe



3.37 kg Munich Malt (9.0 SRM) 56.0 %

1.93 kg Pilsner, Malt Craft Export (Joe White) 32.0 %

0.24 kg Chocolate Malt (Joe White) (381.0 SRM) 4.0 %

0.24 kg Crystal, Dark (Joe White) (110.0 SRM) 4.0 %

0.12 kg Carafa I (337.0 SRM) 2.0 %

0.12 kg Roasted Barley (Joe White) (710.0 SRM) 2.0 %

All you need to do is ring/fax your brewshop with the above and ask them to crush it for you. You can then pick it up later in the day. It will be all mixed up and in a large brown paper bag. Keep it in the fridge until you use it and try and use it within a week at most now that it is crushed.

2. Work Out the Temperature of Your Mash: Youll should be able to get this from your recipe as well especially if it is a recipe in Beersmith or Promash format. In fact, it would be well worth your while doing your first AGs with one of these programs. Mash temperatures range from around 65 to 69 degrees. The lower end of the scale produces drier, thinner beers such as youd find in a typical lager or pilsener. The higher end produces fuller, sweeter beers. Our recipe asked to mash at 66 degrees.

3. Heat Enough Water for Your Mash: Im going to assume youre using one of the brewing programs above. It will tell you how much water to heat for your mash. Our recipe says to heat 15.04 litres which is about 2.5 litres of water for each kg of grain. (We ended up accidentally throwing 17 litres in no big deal though. One beer and already we couldnt count!)

4. Heat Your Mash Water to 9 Degrees Higher than What You Want Your Mash to Be: If you simply heated your water to 66 degrees and then added your grain the mix would be cooler than 66 degrees as the grain is at room temperature. (If you kept your grain in the fridge, take it out the day before you brew so it reaches room temperature.) Up here, room temp is about 25 degrees and so Ross knows if he adds 9 degrees to his mash temperature then the final mix will equal 66 degrees. 66+9 = 75 so we heated our 15 litres of water to 75 degrees.



The beer programs will work out the above for you pretty accurately. If you forgot to take your grain out of the fridge or if you live in a colder climate, the program will compensate for this and you would find yourself having to heat your mash water to a higher temperature than 75.


5. Pre-Heat Your Mash Tun: We didnt bother with this but you might like to boil a kettle and warm your mash tun up a little. Probably doesnt make much difference in an esky. Its also a good idea to keep a full kettle boiled in case you dont quite reach your strike temperature which in our case was 66 degrees.


6. Pour the Hot Water Into the Tun and Add Grain: Your 15 litres of water at 75 degrees goes in first. Then pour your grain in from a height smoothly and fairly quickly around the top of the water. Give it a good mix up making sure any balls of grain are broken up. Take a temperature reading and if its out by more than a degree or so, then add some hot or cold water to hit your 66 degrees. Let it sit for 90 minutes. If you want to check the temp and give it a stir half way through then go for it. We didnt and the final temp didnt drop at all.


7. Bring Your Sparge Water to the Boil: Its not a bad idea to do this once you have the mash under way. Once boiled, you can turn it off and give it another burst of heat just before the mash ends. Another great thing about batch sparging is no mucking around with getting sparge water temperatures right. All you have to do is boil the water once.



Again, your recipe will tell you how much water to boil for sparging. In our case, it said sparge with 21.42 litres of 90 degree water. (Forget the 90 bit.) So, we boiled up about 22 litres and well just use 22 for the sake of this exercise.


8. Work Out Amount of Sparge Water for the First Run: What happens now is the sparge water is added to the tun in 2 equal hits but we need to allow for the water already in the mash tun and the water that will be soaked up and held in the grain. Heres the only maths youll need and its pretty simple.



Firsly, look at your recipe to find out what the required boil volume is. (This is the volume of water that will go into the kettle at the beginning of the boil.) In our case it was 30.44lts. Beersmith works this figure out by allowing for dead space in your tun and kettle, water soaked up and not released by the grain and also evaporation during the boil. As you can see, having Beersmith or Promash makes things easy. Heres the only calculation you need to do.



A. We have a required boil volume of 30.44 litres. Lets call it 30



B. Beersmith tells us that our sparge volume of water is 22

C. We want 2 equal runs of volume so 30 divided by 2 equals 15



D. First run volume equals B-C which equals 7



Therefore on our first run we add 7 litres of boiling water to the grain and water already in the tun.



You might be wondering why you just dont add 2 lots of 15 litres. If we did this, what we drained off from the first run would be a far larger volume from that drained off on the second run as all the mash water (15.04 litres less that held by the grain) would be drained off along with 15litres of sparge water. The main reason though is if we added 15litres on the first run, the wort would become too hot i.e. it would be over 80 degrees Celsius. Why is this a problem?



The idea of sparging is to rinse the grain of all sugars. Obviously the hotter the water we use, the easier it is to rinse the grain, just like rinsing honey off a teaspoon. The problem is if we go over 80 degrees, tannins will also be brought out of the grain. 80 degrees is the hottest we can get without extracting tannins.

9. Add the Boiling Water to the Tun for the First Run: Now just tip the 15 litres into the tun and give it a very good stir up and then let it sit for about 15 minutes. Youll notice that the temperature of the mash is now higher than 66. Ours only rose to 72 after we added the sparge water for the first run. This is because we added less water to make up for the extra few litres we incorrectly added at the start of the mash. So, 80 degrees would have been better but, once again no big deal.

(What should you be doing with the other 15 litres of boiled water while all this is going on? The answer is nothing. Just leave it off the heat and it will lose temperature, which is what you want as the first run water will have raised the grain bed temp, hopefully up to around 80. If it did, then you just need to have the second run water at about 80 as well, as no heat will be lost when you add it.)

10. Drain the Tun for the First Time: The stirring we did above is what rinses the sugar out of the grain in batch sparging. The sitting for 15 minutes really just allows things to settle a little. Up until now, no liquid has been drained from the tun. Nows the time for this!


(The other great thing about batch sparging, is that it is not critical where your manifold lies in the esky. Youve probably read a lot about this. Same with grain bed depth. These mainly apply to fly sparging. In batch sparging, its the minute or so of thorough stirring that does the work of rinsing. The only thing the manifold and grain bed depth does is filter the beer. All we did was make sure my braid was lying on the bottom after we did the stir up. Youll see pics of the manifold in the thread on my first AG).

To drain the tun, first of all grab a jug, open the tun tap and allow a steady trickle of wort into the jug. Youll see it become clear (less cloudy) after 1 or 2 litres as the grain bed settles and starts to act as a filter. Turn the tap off and pour the 1 or 2 litres back into the esky. We poured it slowly over a cheese grater so as not to stir up the bed. This works well.

Now, open the tap and allow the wort to drain in your kettle. This might take 15 minutes or so. 1 litre draining per minute is about what to aim for although with batch sparging you can go as fast as you like as long as the wort does not become cloudy.

Once drained, you can whack the kettle on the heat to start bringing it to the boil while you work on the second run.

11. The Second Run: The second run is just like the first except this time youll be adding the remainder of the sparge water (15lts) to the now drained grain. As I said above, the temperature of the second run sparge water does not have to be boiling as the grain bed is already up around 80 degrees. By the time you have done your first run, youll find that your second run sparge water will have cooled and be around 80 degrees or so. Throw it in!

Now repeat what you did for the first run. i.e. stir the mash up really well again, let sit for 15 minutes, drain off one or two litres of wort until it becomes clear, return that to the tun and then drain wort into the kettle.

Mashing and sparging complete! Boil away, adding your hops when appropriate, and after 90 minutes you should be able to drain off about 23 litres. In my case, I told Beersmith that thered be 1 litre of wort Id be unable to syphon from the kettle. The program worked out thered be about 6 litres evaporated in the boil. 23+1+6 = the Initial Boil Volume of 30 litres that Beersmith worked out in 8 above.


Cheers

Pat

 

[pint of lager]

WhistlingJack, how far are you from Perth? It helps if you can see a mash done. If there is no-one in your area to visit, there are plenty of online resources.

Start off with partial mashes, they are a great way to introduce yourself to the magic of mashing without the hassle of a big batch.

The more information and background reading, the clearer the process will be.

Am up to ag#102 here, batch size 45 litres, and still haven't seen anyone else mash. Did heaps of partial mashes and slowly eased up to 23 litre ag using two pots boiling on the stove in the kitchen. The gear has gone through many changes since then. So go for it.

 

[berazafi]

Whistling, im with Pint if you can find someone to watch mash do so, you will be suprised at how much puting the process into words complicates it. There is also a good video on the net (dont know link), hopfully one of the enlitened will chime in

I to have never seen a mash and just learned from here, videos and asking questions

As for partials i never have done one, and there is no reason to do one (that i can find) if you have a bigger enough boiler and mash/lauter tun

 

[Trough Lolly]

Thanks for the reply.

I have read Palmers online book, but I'm still not sure about the process.

So, I drain off the wort after 60 minutes, then add more hot water? How much and for how long do I let it stand?

Ok, in addition to all the useful info (esp. the article that Pat wrote) you need to understand why you're doing what you're doing...
//Apologies in advance if this appears all too simple or I'm teaching you to suck eggs!\\

First of all, you need to crack the grain you want to make the wort (unfermented beer). Get the homebrew shop you bought the grains from to do it if you don't have a mill.
Once the grains are cracked, you add them to the mashtun that has approx. 2.3L per kilo of grain in the mashtun (and make the water at least 10 degrees hotter than the target mash temp otherwise the cool grains will make your mash temp fall short - keep some boiling water handy to push up the temp if necessary).
The mash is like a loose porridge - you need to add water to the crushed grains so the crushed starch particles get converted, by some enzymes in the grain, to sugar. It's this sugar that the yeast eats to give you alcohol and CO2 as byproducts. The starch and enzymes are key elements of malted grains.
After a 1 hour soak (mash), you need to remove the mash water and then add some more water by either slowly drizzling water onto the grain bed (fly sparging) or adding a volume of water, stirring, and then emptying again (Batch Sparging). You won't get a lot out of the mashtun to begin with since a kilo of grains will soak up roughly 1 litre of water but you need to get the liqour out of the mashtun and into the kettle to boil it.
A good recipe program will work out your water calcs but essentially you need to stop sparging if your mash liquor drops below 1.010 gravity otherwise you risk extracting harsh tannins.
Once you've finished sparging the mash grains, you will have a sweet wort liquor that needs to be boiled so you can bitter and flavour the malt extract with hops. Boil for an hour and add hops at particular intervals to add bittering, flavour and aroma profiles to suit your needs or the style of beer you're making.
Cool after the boil, transfer from the kettle to a fermenter, pitch yeast and seal.
That's it in a nutshell, Palmer's book provides more detail on those steps.
Cheers,
TL

 

[Whistlingjack]

Thanks for the tips

I live in the country, so its difficult for me to watch a brew being done.

I have all the equipment ready for assembly, and the necessary ingredients. Just a bit unsure of the mashing process.

I've done partials (a long time ago) on the stove top. Been doing K&K for quite a while.

Brewday is coming up in about a week's time so I'll let you know how I go.

 

[poppa joe]

Good One..
TL..Arsenegger..
Answered a lot of my queries as well..(fly and batch sparging)
I am doing a few trials as well at moment
Getting a few things together
Getting the ingredients here is the biggest problem..
Downloaded Arseneger ( Pats post....)
now my hardrive is full..
Cheers
PJ

 

[matti]

High all and especially whistling Jack.
great thread.
I wish you all the best newbie Ag brewers as i am envious a buggery...
Just want to recommend Gregorys Noonans book "New brewing lager beer" again.
The book may seem a bit technical for some BUT only if you let it Be.
Its the best reference book to have in your library re: brewing.
I brew lagers and ale pending on time allowed.
I am not aware of your brewhouse methods but a few tips since u admit it was a while ago you did partials.
Malt crushed recently same day or vacuum packed
ensure doughing in is good/ saturate entire mash STIR! improves efficiency.
Infusion mash? don't disturb! Decoction? Read the book!
Rigid temperature control through mashing period.
When sparging/draining ideally ensure your grain bed is pourous and temp at 66-68 through out.
When run off S.g. 1.012 or clear allow to mash to drain.
The ph should be 5.2-5.5 @ this stage.
It would be an idea to adjust sparging liqour ph to 6.4-6.6 after boiling.
Hope I havent confuse you
Matti :wacko:

 

[Gulf Brewery]

Hi

Just to clarify a few things that have been mentioned in the thread


Sparging is a bugger for the first few times and has a lot of effect on your efficiency. Just be prepared for low efficiency in your first few batches, just add a bit more grain to the mash to compensate, you can dilute in the kettle if you SG is too high before you start boiling (500g of DME nearby is also handy )

Dont forget the the How to Brew site has a lot of good information to help you. Noonan is a great reference, but not really bedtime reading.

Newbie AG'ers shouldnt get hung up on things like pH. When you have your process under control, then look at fine tuning things like this.

And most of all - relax, the beer will be fine.

Cheers
Pedro

 

[Whistlingjack]

I've gotta say...how easy it was.

Thanks to all for your advice. I'm now embarrassed (but don't regret) that I asked the questions.

WJ

 

[fixa]

There are no stupid questions, only stupid mistakes that are made when the stupid questions are not asked.