New to Beer Brewing

[Seras]

G'day
Just hopping on the forum to ask a some questions and get some advice since I've decided to start doing my own brews because I'm sick of getting ripped off with constant tax and price rises.

I'm planning to make some basic ale type beer tomorrow so I've just been to the shop and gotten some things - 4 kg of pale ale malt milled, golden promise I think, and 1kg of either vienna or munich, I said either was ok. Looking at recipes this should be enough for around 5% for 22l or so? I've also got a pack of cascade hops which according to a calculator online I need to boil 15g from 60 minutes and 85g for 10 minutes to get about 30 IBU.
The only thing though is my boiler and my fermenters are about the same size at 25l, and so I was planning to stuff in as much as I could for the mash, and then once that was done, topping it up to 25l again to boil the hops and then once that's done putting the remainder in my fermenter. Would I run in to any problems doing this? I've also got a heat control system and I've got a heat mat and I was gonna borrow a mates air con system to try to keep the batch at around 20c or so.

Any thoughts/advice? Thanks.

 

[Nick the Knife]

Congrats on taking the leap - I'm not sure if the intros section is best for recipe advice but others more learned will advise.

Seems you have significant knowledge already in the brewing sphere - have you done previously but coming back to now? Observed friends/relos doing? Or just gone on a deep dive and armed up with info for your initial effort?

I'll assume you have all your cleaning and no rinse sanitation products? Temp control for the ferment will be key to a good result, you seem to have initiatives in place for this - using AC to do it sounds tricky but perhaps you have in a small space.

Your malts sound fine - sounds like essentially BIAB type approach on the day? Not sure if you plan on taking gravity readings/refractometer etc - not vital but might be handy for future brews or finding issues.

Depends on how you like your brew but bear in mind those hop boil IBUs sometimes don't take into account the time taken to chill the hot wort. So if you're struggling in that regard you can end up overshooting it significantly.

I doubt you'll need the heat mat to keep it at the normal preferred ale ferment temps of 18c or so.

What is your 'boiler' that you speak of? Have a tap on it and hosing to make for an easy and safe transfer?

Yeast?

I assume you're bottling?

All sounds pretty good to me - just get everything organised and sorted out well in advance, nothing worse that having a glitch on the day throw everything out of kilter.

 

[Drubbing]

The only thing though is my boiler and my fermenters are about the same size at 25l, and so I was planning to stuff in as much as I could for the mash, and then once that was done, topping it up to 25l again to boil the hops and then once that's done putting the remainder in my fermenter.

I moved on from kits a while ago, but the only gear I added was a grain bag and 14L pot. I do 4kg mashes and boils in 12L of water, then top up the fermenter to 23L with water and some dry malt. It's worked well so far.

When I do get a bigger pot or kettle, it'll probably only be a 20L, so I can fit a full 5kg mash, but just top up the fermenter after.

 

[Seras]

Thanks for the replies. I have brewed a few plum wines and sugar mashes before but not beer.

So here's how it went:

I started the day by going to bunnings and getting some copper pipe and pipe bender, then when I got home I bent it into some grotesque shape so it could fit in my t500 boiler, and I got a fridge that's been out in the shed and gave it a clean so I could put my fermentor in it. Had tea, etc., and get started with the mash, get water up to temp, put grain in the bag and dump it in, etc. I may have had the mash temp a bit high though because I had it at 70c since I thought the grain would cool it down a bit. Anyway let it steep a bit and did some other things and when I came back it was 70c again, so even though my temp controller was set to 63 it mustn't have been quick enough to turn off the heat so hopefully it didn't go higher than 70. Anyway, pour some cold water over the grain and measure OG, which is about 1.032, which is a bit low so will need to look at that in the future to see what the problem is since I thought 5kg of grain should be enough. But no problem really, I decide to boil the bittering hops for the full 60 min, take them out, let it boil a bit longer and then add the flavour hops for 10 mins, and by this time it's reduced to about 17l and the OG is around 040, (though hard to say for certain since there's foam and it hasn't cooler down completely). As soon as I take the last hops out and turn off the power, I know time is of the essence to cool down the wort, and this is when all hell breaks loose. I go out into the night to turn on the hose, only to find the hose.is now a sprinkler watering the lawn - when I pulled the wort chiller through my window into the bathtub I must have pulled a kink and the damn thing is now almost in 2 pieces. And I am thinking back to when I was at bunnings considering a roll of duct tape but no I was too much of a niggard. So I rush back into the house and bring out the only thing I can think of, which is some cling wrap and some paper painter's tape. I've got my phone with the flashlight hanging from my mouth by the rubber case because it's completely dark while I try to do makeshift repairs on the hose and while I try to break off some cling wrap I draw my thumb over the metal jaggies which starts bleeding immediately over the tape which is now stained red. So I turn the tap on and of course the hose still leaks but I clasp my hands over it and this managed to generate enough pressure to get the water going through the hose to start the flow going. I go back into the house and dip my hands into star san, and you can see my holding the chiller trying to direct the flow into the bathtub, along with the matt which I was hosing down since I got blood in it since I was getting blood on everything, just trying to not get it into the wort. Anyway nothing too exciting after that point, everything seems to go on, except for the fact that the "easy" siphon apparently thought it would be too easy to include enough hose to actually be able to siphon anything, so I had to pour it into my fermenter and hopefully didn't oxidise it too much. Turned out a nice brown colour and I love the smell of the hops, hopefully they taste good too. Got the brew in the fridge right now, just waiting for it to get to pitching temp, might do that tomorrow morning since it's late now.

 

[Nick the Knife]

Yikes, sounds like a helluva way to get your stress levels up and I'd imagine your description didn't come close to matching how frustrating it would have been.

Hopefully will be fine but does sound like there's a lot of potential for an infection. I suspect you bit off a tad much bere for a new brewer - a lot of new and untested grear is always a recipe for disaster.

Worst case scenario - doing a dry run to make sure everything works alright with a small boil of water is a handy way to ensure you don't waste a batch of wort.

Here's hoping all okay - but I'd be looking to get a tap into that boiler for your next brew.

Were your hop additions placed in bags or just tossed into the wort? If the latter you might have overshot your IBUs targets by quite a bit.

Is good of you to post as is something of a cautionary tale for new brewers. Hope the hand comes good and you escape with a drinkable brew.

 

[Drubbing]

I found the idea of a wort chiller too hard, and in summer the water coming out of the tap is hot anyway, so a lot of wastage.

A simpler method is to cube the wort to cool overnight. You can extract all the air so no issues. As I'm mashing only 14L, and need to add extra water anyway, I cool my wort with a bag of ice. That gets me close to pitching temperature.

 

[Seras]

Yikes, sounds like a helluva way to get your stress levels up and I'd imagine your description didn't come close to matching how frustrating it would have been.

Hopefully will be fine but does sound like there's a lot of potential for an infection. I suspect you bit off a tad much bere for a new brewer - a lot of new and untested grear is always a recipe for disaster.

Worst case scenario - doing a dry run to make sure everything works alright with a small boil of water is a handy way to ensure you don't waste a batch of wort.

Here's hoping all okay - but I'd be looking to get a tap into that boiler for your next brew.

Were your hop additions placed in bags or just tossed into the wort? If the latter you might have overshot your IBUs targets by quite a bit.

Is good of you to post as is something of a cautionary tale for new brewers. Hope the hand comes good and you escape with a drinkable brew.

Despite the drama I don't things went too bad and I've got plenty of lessons learned for next time regardless of how the beer turns out.
I don't think too much got into the wort besides a couple gnats, so next time I might do it in the daytime and put a cover over while the wort chiller is in. The boiler has a tap in it so I could use that next time I suppose. I've got a big tea ball type thing for the hops, though they fully expanded inside so maybe they want more room. I had a taste of the wort and it had lots of aromatics like I wanted, though maybe could have used even more bittering, but that's a bit hard to say before it's done.
I think the main thing is trying to get more essence out of the grain, my boiler is pretty small and I didn't actually have it filled up as much as I could have, so maybe didn't have enough water circulating though it or maybe the higher water saturation inhibits further absorbtion.

I found the idea of a wort chiller too hard, and in summer the water coming out of the tap is hot anyway, so a lot of wastage.

A simpler method is to cube the wort to cool overnight. You can extract all the air so no issues. As I'm mashing only 14L, and need to add extra water anyway, I cool my wort with a bag of ice. That gets me close to pitching temperature.

I looked it up and that seems like an interesting idea. I like the concept of having long-lasting containers of wort ready to go whenever. Though the wort chiller method seems fine for me, cause it's only river water, and might attach a hose to the other end so I can water the garden with the waste water. I also might crank up the fridge to full blast to help it cool down quicker, because I only got it down to around 45c with the chiller and it took 9 or so hours to get down to pitching temp after that.

 

[Nick the Knife]

Despite the drama I don't things went too bad and I've got plenty of lessons learned for next time regardless of how the beer turns out.
I don't think too much got into the wort besides a couple gnats, so next time I might do it in the daytime and put a cover over while the wort chiller is in. The boiler has a tap in it so I could use that next time I suppose. I've got a big tea ball type thing for the hops, though they fully expanded inside so maybe they want more room. I had a taste of the wort and it had lots of aromatics like I wanted, though maybe could have used even more bittering, but that's a bit hard to say before it's done.
I think the main thing is trying to get more essence out of the grain, my boiler is pretty small and I didn't actually have it filled up as much as I could have, so maybe didn't have enough water circulating though it or maybe the higher water saturation inhibits further absorbtion.

I looked it up and that seems like an interesting idea. I like the concept of having long-lasting containers of wort ready to go whenever. Though the wort chiller method seems fine for me, cause it's only river water, and might attach a hose to the other end so I can water the garden with the waste water. I also might crank up the fridge to full blast to help it cool down quicker, because I only got it down to around 45c with the chiller and it took 9 or so hours to get down to pitching temp after that.

Hmmm you might have gotten lucky - as sounds like it might have been too hot for too much to 'infect' it. 9hrs is a long time to pitch - I get antsy when it's even close to an hour. But am sure it'll be fine. Sounds positive from your tasting anyway.

Does sound like your water situation is handy & fine for using your chiller (1.5m of copper or more?) - but for the hassle alone, I'd be looking at 'no chill cubes' for simplicity & being nearly foolproof. As you now know getting that boiling wort down to 40-50c is pretty easy - but it's that last bit down to 16-20c thats very hard to do by ambient water temps alone. Blasting it in a fridge will be a big power hog and is very inefficient - but will work given overnight etc.

 

[Seras]

So to give an update, the beer is bubbling, very slowly, though this is using a new screw-on-lid fermenter which could be leaking. It seems to have developed a krausen when I checked, maybe I shouldn't have opened it but I was wondering why it was so slow.

I did make another mash, this time with peated malt and no hops, and just pitched in some bakers yeast (the other one had fancy lalbrew verdant IPA ale yeast) and only 3 hours later is bubbling like mad. I stirred this mash a fair bit which seems to have helped a bit but efficiency is still very low, .052 of from 8 kgs of grain in about 23 litres of water. The only thing I can think of is the t-500 boiler is too small as the water struggles to circulate around the grain and it also makes temperature control hard as the heat does not evenly distribute through the mash well leading to rapid 8C drops and spikes depending on where the thermometer is. Next time, I am not going to steep in a bag I am just going to put the barley in the water and when it's done I'll pop it the bag over the fermenter when I pour it in, and if that doesn't work I'll have to do 2 mashes or get a bigger boiler.

 

[Drubbing]

I wouldn't worry about how active a brew is when fermenting. It's not a reliable indicator of anything. Active ferments don't necessarily turn out better.

But you don't want your fermenter airtight. Coopers fermenters just have a fitted lid which allows air movement. Other bucket/drum types will have an airlock.

 

[Nick the Knife]

So to give an update, the beer is bubbling, very slowly, though this is using a new screw-on-lid fermenter which could be leaking. It seems to have developed a krausen when I checked, maybe I shouldn't have opened it but I was wondering why it was so slow.

I did make another mash, this time with peated malt and no hops, and just pitched in some bakers yeast (the other one had fancy lalbrew verdant IPA ale yeast) and only 3 hours later is bubbling like mad. I stirred this mash a fair bit which seems to have helped a bit but efficiency is still very low, .052 of from 8 kgs of grain in about 23 litres of water. The only thing I can think of is the t-500 boiler is too small as the water struggles to circulate around the grain and it also makes temperature control hard as the heat does not evenly distribute through the mash well leading to rapid 8C drops and spikes depending on where the thermometer is. Next time, I am not going to steep in a bag I am just going to put the barley in the water and when it's done I'll pop it the bag over the fermenter when I pour it in, and if that doesn't work I'll have to do 2 mashes or get a bigger boiler.

Well atleast you can get your rookie checklist ticked for opening the fermenter to check on it ;-) No, not opening is always the best policy haha but I dare say you knew this - to be fair I've done it too. This is where using cling wrap and a rubber band works well.

So you made an unhopped mash? I assume this one is for distilling later into some spirits?

Bear in mind if you go down the 'no bag' and pour into fermenter - you are either going to run the risk of leaving it to cool in the boiler until safe to pour - or running the risk of tipping a lot of very hot liquid with splashing risk and sieving hassle - it's easier said than done.

This is where as @Drubbing mentioned, no chill cubing - can be very handy but unsure on your plans as I'd be wanting to use the tap in your boiler but you'll need to ensure the grain doesn't go through it - perhaps affix a bazooka screen/filter on the inside. Dunno seems you are fine doing slightly unorthodox, which I am myself too but taps make things a lot easier.

 

[Seras]

So I've bottled the beer, with a FG of 1.012. I've have a taste and I was expecting it to have lots of strange and funky flavours, but surprisingly it tasted very clean and mild; relatively pale. The main flavour is a pronounced hoppy flavour - a bit less than an IPA - from the Cascade hops which I assume are grown here in Tassie. Quite nice. The beer is a lot weaker than I was aiming for at around 3.7% but I expect when it's done it'll be quite a nice refreshing drink for after work, but I'll have to wait and see.
I've also got two more brews going, another cascade ale and a milk stout. I've still been struggling with efficiency at just over 50% brewhouse efficiency by my calculations - not sure exactly what I'm doing wrong but I've just been compensating by adding more grain to I don't get weak beers. I did try the no-bag method, but stupidly I forgot that I needed to boil after the mash (you can tell I'm the type to blunder my queen in chess from making obvious mistakes), so I had to pour into the fermenter to strain the grain out and then pour it back in, which like you mentioned Nick was quite a heft. It was a bit of heft. I did read that hot-side aeration of wort is bad, however, I've been reassured by an experiment that seemed to suggest that HSA didn't make a big difference. This time at least the ale is going strong from the get-go, I think the problem before is that I didn't oxygenate the wort.

Concerning the cubing method, is there any reason why it can't be done in a fermentor? I've read that any air is bad but I assume this is just if you are storing it for long periods or want to submerge it in water to cool it down?

Concerning the tap on the boiler, I'd have to attach a hose to stop it splashing anyway, so I may as well just siphon it out and that way I'll get a better flow rate.

In the future I'm thinking of having a go at making a pilsner lager, something that will be appealing to friends and family that aren't all beer drinkers. The only problem is the fridge real estate that this will take up - I'm thinking of buying more fridges or making a cool room/box. Though, styrofoam is actually a lot more expensive than you'd expect.

 

[Drubbing]

The beer is a lot weaker than I was aiming for at around 3.7% but I expect when it's done it'll be quite a nice refreshing drink for after work, but I'll have to wait and see.

5kg of malt should have returned an ABV nearer the estimated 5%. No mentions of your bottling process. Silly question maybe, but did you add sugar for the secondary ferment/conditioning? Going in your gravity numbers 1040-1012 = 3.7%. Sugar for 2nd ferment adds another 0.5%

 

[Seras]

Yep. I've been getting consistently low efficiency at around 50%, the last ale I did I added 6.75kg of malt and got 22L @ 1.052 off the top of my head, and the milk stout was similar. The only thing I can think of is that the t-500 boiler is too narrow and doesn't allow enough water to spread around and permeate though the grain. At least the sheep get to eat all the extra grain.

As for bottling, I simply turned on the fridge overnight to cold crash and then siphoned it into bottles, and I added 2 sugar tablets per 750ml bottle as per the instructions - good to know it will bump up the ABV a bit. I did have to recap the bottles as I had a bright idea of boiling the caps so they would expand and then shrink when they cooled for a better seal, but all that accomplished was to detach the plastic liners on the inside of the caps and make them not seal at all.

 

[Nick the Knife]

@Seras , firstly congrats on what sounds like a good result on your initial brew - thats no mean feat considering the palava you almost had - so good job by you.

I don't pretend to be an AG boffin - but regarding the crushing of your grain was this done by your or the LHBS? You might be right about the circulation of the wort in the T-500 - but I don't thin it's dimensions would be that different to any other upright boilers. A tap would allow you to manually recirculate the wort - as you might also be getting a temperature differential from where the temp sensor would be (at bottom) and the rest of the capacity. More stirring, grain or adding an adjunct like dextrose etc to get to your desired alcohol level are work arounds.

I'm very surprised your T-500 doesn't come with a tap on it - all the one's I've seen for sale do. I won't bang on about the benefits of a tap, but I will just say it's very rare for users on here to siphon hot wort - I considered it myself but in the end I had to concede their might be a good reason behind this - anyway hopefully it works well for you - which is the most important thing.

I think I also saw that study on aeration of hot side wort being something of a furfy - dunno I think there might be something to it - but its easy enough to avoid - but again it's one of those things with siphoning hot wort:
http://howtobrew.com/book/section-1/yeast/yeast-nutritional-needs/aeration-is-good-oxidation-is-bad
You might find with your plans for brewing a pilsener that it's best to plan your brews around the expected ambient temps down your way at the time of year e.g winters there might be perfect for pilseners, with a basic cobbled up temperature chamber fine to aid stability, summers you do ales etc.

I live rural as well and yes, the wildlife and animals do seem to enjoy the left over grain - which is always handy. Look forward to hearing how your next brews go.

 

[HLBrew]

Learning by doing is a big part of the fun of brewing!

Regarding your efficiency issues, I couldn't see how much strike water you were adding but as a basic rule of thumb, aim for a liquor to grist ratio of about 3:1. Going too low or too high can have a big impact on your mash efficiency - loading up on extra malt to get your extract level up may not yield the result you're looking for. If you're not already using one, a brewing calculator like Beersmith or Brewers Friend is a great help when getting your strike water volumes, temps and liquor to grist ratio right.

Also, if doing single vessel, I'd strongly recommend sticking with the grain bag. You can make excellent beer with BIAB. At the end of the mash, lift the bag out slowly and let as much of the extract drain out as possible, then hand sparge with a few jugs of water at about 75-77 degrees. This will make sure you're not leaving valuable extract behind. Similarly, a good calculator will help you work out exactly how much volume of sparge water you'll need to hit your target gravity.

As you get further down the rabbit hole, you might want to look at your water chemistry as another source of better mash efficiency and better attenuation during fermentation.

Beer! Fun!

 

[Timewellspent]

Here is a great you tube clip on the risks of no chill in a fermenter



My last brew I tried putting gladwrap over the top of my digi boil after I had finished my whirlpool additions - only just packaged it a few days ago so too soon to tell if it was a good idea or not

 

[Tony121]

Recommend you dunk sparge next time, second pot with x amount sparge water to move the bag into after pulling from the vessel.