My friend Marlow and I had our first crack at AG brewing today. Whilst the results are obviously still pending, the early signs are very promising, though it is probable that we may have to deal with some slight astringency issues as a result of rookie errors. Hardly surprising given that neither of us had ever actually seen AG brewing done before, and despite gleaning all sorts of useful advice from you very generous AHB members, it turned out that some mistakes we just had to go ahead and learn from by ourselves.
So let me set the scene. We'd already spent every crumb we had getting just enough equipment for a BIAB effort. Whilst I know this technique erks a lot of you, to those of us who know no better and have no other options, it certainly beats kit brewing. We did however, add our own slight variance to the more traditional BIAB methods described in other posts. Given we were sharing our brews we wanted to be able to turn out double batches, and so to handle the extra weight we decided to make 4 grain bags, each to be filled equally and emmersed simultaneously. Other equipment we had was a good looking 60L aluminium pot from underpressure.com.au (no affiliation), and a high pressure gas burner aptly named Rambo. I'd also constructed a copper immersion chiller (from copper courtesy of Jye), and i'd managed to track down a pretty standard sort of electric garden water pump that i thought might come in handy.
Clearly, having done this only once i needn't bore you all with the process we followed, save to say that it was roughly as set out by the BIAB intructions on the wiki. The recipe was for an APA using cascade and amirillo hops, but in hindsight i think that combination might have been just a touch too citrusy for the taste i had in mind. Fortunately i'm yet to find a beer style i don't like, so i'm sure it won't be a problem.
On to the important stuff. What lessons did we learn? Well, the first is that refractometers are probably the best invention ever. In what turned out to be about the most random coincidence of recent memory, the one i ordered off ebay was actually walked up my driveway by the courier not 5 mins before we were due to finish mashing. I think i might now take great delight in throwing my hydrometer off a building. It could just be the novelty value of my new toy, but i see no reason to ever use a hydrometer again.
Second lesson: if you brew in a bag, don't squeeze your grain bag too tight. In our zeal to get good efficiency, despite the fact that we weren't even measuring it, we tried to get a little too much from our spent grain bag. What i didn't know at the time is that under the right circumstances you can actually see these so called 'tannins' - yet before wringing the bag almost to dryness you could not. Trouble is these damn grain bags are much harder to un-squeeze than they are to squeeze. Makes removing tannis very difficult. So it would appear that the source for the mild astringency I noticed upon testing has been found; the lesson has been learnt; and the hope is for the mistake to not be made again, by anyone.
Lesson 3: 4kg of ice is not enough to significantly alter the temperature of 50L of freshly boiled wort. Before you ask though, no we did not add ice to our wort. Instead, i had come up with a bit of an untraditional design for my copper immersion chiller. Hopefully i'll work out how to get a photo of all this up when i finish typing, but just in case, i'll try and explain it in words. The idea was to have a small coil (from about 4m of copper) sit in a bucket of ice water and then lead straight into a big coil (from about 14m of copper) that would sit in the mash tun. I'm sure i'm not the first person to do this, but i've not seen any pics of it in the moment and a half that i took to never really look. Nontheless, i think it's a good idea because it gets the otherwise ambient tap water cold before it enters the coil in the wort, which helps to cool the wort faster. In our adventures today we did test this theory and it proved to be quite effective. The trouble however, arose from me being too ambitious in my water conservation. As you'll hopefully see from the pictures, i connected the whole thing to a pump that would recirculate the water through the coils. Clearly my intuitive sense of thermodynamics is a little misguided. I seriously thought that one bag of ice would be enough to keep the cooling bucket cold whilst not more than 15L of water circulated around the system. So so wrong. It took about 3 minutes before all the ice had been melted and every liquid in the entire system had reached equilibrium at a temperature too hot to touch. Careful analyses after this failure has led me to believe that such a system would work truly brialliantly if a big enough reservoir was available. A swimming pool for instance, would be perfect. A half full fermenter, not so perfect. In the end though, given that i don't have a pool, the only reservoir be enough that we found we could 'tap' into was the wivenhoe dam, so the recirculation idea was abandoned and all the plants ended up getting a good drink of warm water.
That's it for the lessons, but hopefully after fermenting, adding polyclar and filtering, the only evidence of our mistakes will be here in this post. Should that not be the case i'm sure Marlow and I will have no trouble drinking our brew, and swearing upon all things sacred to us that it is the best damn beer we've ever tasted.
Here are some pics
Me and my new toys.
Marlow and afore mentioned new toys.
The 'old spade handle' method of mashing.
My attempts at a recirculating immersion chiller. Note the size of the fermenter/reservoir on the left. Note also that to try this yourself you'd want something about the size of a wheelie bin.
Here ends my first post.
So let me set the scene. We'd already spent every crumb we had getting just enough equipment for a BIAB effort. Whilst I know this technique erks a lot of you, to those of us who know no better and have no other options, it certainly beats kit brewing. We did however, add our own slight variance to the more traditional BIAB methods described in other posts. Given we were sharing our brews we wanted to be able to turn out double batches, and so to handle the extra weight we decided to make 4 grain bags, each to be filled equally and emmersed simultaneously. Other equipment we had was a good looking 60L aluminium pot from underpressure.com.au (no affiliation), and a high pressure gas burner aptly named Rambo. I'd also constructed a copper immersion chiller (from copper courtesy of Jye), and i'd managed to track down a pretty standard sort of electric garden water pump that i thought might come in handy.
Clearly, having done this only once i needn't bore you all with the process we followed, save to say that it was roughly as set out by the BIAB intructions on the wiki. The recipe was for an APA using cascade and amirillo hops, but in hindsight i think that combination might have been just a touch too citrusy for the taste i had in mind. Fortunately i'm yet to find a beer style i don't like, so i'm sure it won't be a problem.
On to the important stuff. What lessons did we learn? Well, the first is that refractometers are probably the best invention ever. In what turned out to be about the most random coincidence of recent memory, the one i ordered off ebay was actually walked up my driveway by the courier not 5 mins before we were due to finish mashing. I think i might now take great delight in throwing my hydrometer off a building. It could just be the novelty value of my new toy, but i see no reason to ever use a hydrometer again.
Second lesson: if you brew in a bag, don't squeeze your grain bag too tight. In our zeal to get good efficiency, despite the fact that we weren't even measuring it, we tried to get a little too much from our spent grain bag. What i didn't know at the time is that under the right circumstances you can actually see these so called 'tannins' - yet before wringing the bag almost to dryness you could not. Trouble is these damn grain bags are much harder to un-squeeze than they are to squeeze. Makes removing tannis very difficult. So it would appear that the source for the mild astringency I noticed upon testing has been found; the lesson has been learnt; and the hope is for the mistake to not be made again, by anyone.
Lesson 3: 4kg of ice is not enough to significantly alter the temperature of 50L of freshly boiled wort. Before you ask though, no we did not add ice to our wort. Instead, i had come up with a bit of an untraditional design for my copper immersion chiller. Hopefully i'll work out how to get a photo of all this up when i finish typing, but just in case, i'll try and explain it in words. The idea was to have a small coil (from about 4m of copper) sit in a bucket of ice water and then lead straight into a big coil (from about 14m of copper) that would sit in the mash tun. I'm sure i'm not the first person to do this, but i've not seen any pics of it in the moment and a half that i took to never really look. Nontheless, i think it's a good idea because it gets the otherwise ambient tap water cold before it enters the coil in the wort, which helps to cool the wort faster. In our adventures today we did test this theory and it proved to be quite effective. The trouble however, arose from me being too ambitious in my water conservation. As you'll hopefully see from the pictures, i connected the whole thing to a pump that would recirculate the water through the coils. Clearly my intuitive sense of thermodynamics is a little misguided. I seriously thought that one bag of ice would be enough to keep the cooling bucket cold whilst not more than 15L of water circulated around the system. So so wrong. It took about 3 minutes before all the ice had been melted and every liquid in the entire system had reached equilibrium at a temperature too hot to touch. Careful analyses after this failure has led me to believe that such a system would work truly brialliantly if a big enough reservoir was available. A swimming pool for instance, would be perfect. A half full fermenter, not so perfect. In the end though, given that i don't have a pool, the only reservoir be enough that we found we could 'tap' into was the wivenhoe dam, so the recirculation idea was abandoned and all the plants ended up getting a good drink of warm water.
That's it for the lessons, but hopefully after fermenting, adding polyclar and filtering, the only evidence of our mistakes will be here in this post. Should that not be the case i'm sure Marlow and I will have no trouble drinking our brew, and swearing upon all things sacred to us that it is the best damn beer we've ever tasted.
Here are some pics
Me and my new toys.
Marlow and afore mentioned new toys.
The 'old spade handle' method of mashing.
My attempts at a recirculating immersion chiller. Note the size of the fermenter/reservoir on the left. Note also that to try this yourself you'd want something about the size of a wheelie bin.
Here ends my first post.
