01:33 PM' post='137360']
Looks like this thread died in the arse nice and quick.
How do you make that? You only posted it this morning! I'll post a fairly long description of my process and equipment, which makes a pretty decent ale. I'll leave recipes up to others as I'm at work and don't have my recipes here.
As the last few days have shown, there are plenty of different ways to make a partial mash beer.
Equipment:
I use a 10 litre esky for my mash tun (one of the blue "six pack" eskies like you see builders etc carry around for lunch. I think they're about $40 at Bunnings). Inside this I place a copper pipe manifold like this:
The slits in the pipes let the wort thru but hold back the grains. Note the irrigation tap fitting. This is used to slow down the sparge, which increases efficiency.
*Mash Tun
*Two pasta/soup pots (or one large stock pot)
*Thermometer
*Hydrometer
*Spoons
Mash:
With the esky I can mash ~just~ on 3Kg of grain with a 2.5:1 liquor:grist ratio. You know about mashing, add the strike water to the esky at the right temp, stir the grain in quickly and give it a good through mixing (without splashing). I then put the esky onto a folded bath towel and wrap it up with more towels and blankets to keep the heat as constant as possible. About 2-3 times during the 1 hour mash, I open up, check the temp and stir the mash around with a slotted spoon mash paddle.
Sparge:
I use two large-ish pots for the boil. Towards the end of the mash, I heat up the sparge water (into the high 70's) in the larger of the two pots. When the mash is complete, I run off into a jug and gently pour it back onto the top of the mash until it runs clear, then I run the rest off into the small pot (which can hold all of the first runnings). I then gently add the sparge water, stir, wait a few mins for it to settle, then I recirculate again with the jug until clear, then run off into the large pot until I have collected all of the water.
Boil:
Both pots are then placed on adjacent hotplates on my kitchen stove where I turn on full heat. While the wort is coming to the boil, I use a SS ladle to take a spoonful of wort from one pot and put it into the other, then take a spoonful of that and put it into the first. I keep this up until a boil is achieved in an attempt to equalise the gravity between the pots. When the boil is under way, I add the hops roughly half and half to the two pots. Usually, by the end of the boil, enough has evaporated so that the whole lot fits into the larger pot, which I achieve with a ladle, NOT by pouring. (If I were to brew regularly on the stove again, I'd buy a larger stock pot, but as I'm finally getting AG going, I won't bother). Towards the end of the boil, I add any extract and sugar.
Chill
Place the large pot (with the lid on) in a sink full of cold tap water. Gently swirl the pot to improve heat transfer and reduce stratification in the chill water. When the first sinkful of water is hot, I run it out and refill and add some frozen bottles of water, ice packs, ice cubes etc and just leave it for an hour while I clean up, drink beer, sanitise the fermenter, etc. If the boil is less efficient at evaporating, or if there is more wort collected, I'd need to chill both pots. This has only happened once.
Transfer and pitch:
When the wort is cool enough, I tip the pot into a fermenter thru a sanitised SS colander (I use whole hops mostly, so this is enough to catch the hops), place my filter bucket into the top of the fermenter and top up to the desired level with water. I take a gravity reading and adjust with more extract if necessary. Adjustments are often necessary because the size of my pots limit the amount of wort I can collect from the mash tun, so a bit is wasted. Once I'm happy with the gravity, I pitch yeast and ferment like any other beer.
Recipe Formulation:
When formulating a recipe, or changing someone else's to match my gear, I start with the specialty malts (crystal, choc, cara*, munich, etc) and basically leave them in at full capacity. I then add enough base malt to hit the limit of my tun (ie Specialty + base malt = 3Kg). I plug these numbers into Promash and use Promash to work out how much extract I'll need to hit the target OG. I also use Promash to adjust the hopping rates to match target IBU with the Alpha Acid of my current stock of hops.
I have made some really really good beers this way (and a couple of pretty ordinary ones too).
