Preparing For 1st Small Ag Batch

[kevo]

Hi,

I've got a bit of time off in the next few weeks and want to have a go at a small AG batch for the first time. Planning to go BIAB.

A couple of Q's.....

*How do people determine the amount of grain they need for their mash?

*How do people determine efficiency? (I'm guessing these go hand in hand.)

I've read through the BIAB article, got most of my gear together, but some of the links don't seem to come up which help to calculate efficiency (appendix C I think).

Any help appreciated, links to other useful posts appreciated too.

Cheers

Kev

 

[the_fuzz]

Hi,

I've got a bit of time off in the next few weeks and want to have a go at a small AG batch for the first time. Planning to go BIAB.

A couple of Q's.....

*How do people determine the amount of grain they need for their mash?

*How do people determine efficiency? (I'm guessing these go hand in hand.)

I've read through the BIAB article, got most of my gear together, but some of the links don't seem to come up which help to calculate efficiency (appendix C I think).

Any help appreciated, links to other useful posts appreciated too.

Cheers

Kev

First thing I would do is download a free demo of Beersmith - helps immensley

This will answer most of your q's

 

[gerald]

exactly what i was about to say. beersmith solves everything!.....almost

 

[Thirsty Boy]

For your first BiaB, I'd say to work on a 70% efficiency. This gives you two advantages.. first - thats probably around what you will get, you might be a little higher, but for your first brew 70% is a reasonable stab in the dark. Don't sweat it - everybody's first AG - they don't know what the efficiency is.

The second reason I say to use 70% - is because thats the efficiency that the recipes in Brew Your Own and Zymurgy use when calculating their recipes. I know that the recipe book Brewing Classic Styles, uses 70% and I suspect it is somewhat of a standard for recent brewing recipe books. So you would be able to directly copy recipes you see in those publications and scale them to your batch size.

Remember that you are going to lose some wort to trub and hops and gunk in the kettle, probably a liter or two in a small batch - this steals your ingredients. So if you want to put 10L into the fermentor, you actually need to make 12L of wort (or something like that) knowing that you will lose a bit of it.

Dont worry too much, find a recipe, scale it to your volumes and brew it. Crunch the numbers afterwards to see what you got - then feed the results back into the "what I expect" column in your next brew.

And do get yourself a demo copy of one of the brewing software packages. Free and very much up for solving these issues. I personally use Pro-mash rather than Beersmith, but they are both excellent products and will do all the hard working out for you.

Alternatively - tell me what you want to make and how much you intend to put into your fermentor, and I will find/create a recipe for you. Probably pinch it straight out of Brewing Classic Styles, so you know its not just something crazy I came up with. That'll get you started and you can fly solo after you know whats going on a bit better.

I would need - your kettle size, how much you want to make, what you want to make

Cheers

TB