First purchase of AG kit - concerns?

**winvarin** · 08-26-2010, 05:00 AM

I am going to preface this post with the fact that I am by nature a skeptic. I am likely stressing over nothing at all but I wanted to toss this out there and see if any of you can weigh in here.

I have been a long time all grain brewer by traditional recipe. Find something I like, go to the LHBS, buy the ingredients, and away I go.

I was bit by the Pliny bug earlier this year. I tried it for the first time when a family member brought some back at my request from a trip he took to the west coast.

A few hours of Internet research later turned up the All Grain PTE kit from morebeer.com. The kit arrived today and as I am both skeptical (and have a touch of the OCD), I promptly unpacked it and verified what was in the box vs. what was on the packing list.

- Metric ton of hops - check (including whole leaf hops for the mash while the remaining hops were pellets ... nice touch Morebeer!)

- 1 pound, 4 oz of corn sugar - check

- whirlfloc tablet - check (that was another unexpected, yet pleasant, surprise)

- other items I'd ordered - check

- 13# two-row; 14 ounces carapils; 6 ounces crystal 40L - check ... well, wait a minute, there's only one sealed grocery sack in here labled "Two-row malt, 10#"

It's after 11 pm. I'll verify it in the morning. No, wait a sec. OCD is kicking in. Where's my scale?

So I weigh everything in the bag and come to 14 pounds, 6 ounces. A full 2 ounces over the total grain bill.

It all looks the same but I'm no malt expert. So they likely mixed it all together and just labled the bag improperly, right? But the bag only being labled as 10# of 2-row still bugs me. As a skeptic, I am concerned that I didn't get everything I paid for. But as a realist I know that when it's all crushed, there's not likely to be a huge difference to my naked eye in 2 row vs. carapils, and the crystal, at 40L and only 6 ounces, will likely blend in with everything else.

So put my mind at ease and tell me to RDWHAHB. At a bare minimum, I wound up with 14#6oz of all base malt and a heck of a lot of hops.

And once I get this one under my belt, reproducing from bulk ingredients should be a lot easier. Gotta at least love the fact that morebeer, as opposed to other California based brewing mega marts, will tell you exactly what you're getting in a kit. I've had other, otherwise reputable, shops pull the "proprietary" card when I asked them what hops were in a particular kit back in my extract days.

**binaryc0de** · 08-26-2010, 05:40 AM

Yeah I hate when bags of grain get miss labeled... One time I ordered 2 AG mixes from an online home brew supply store. Both had a similar total grain bill weight. Ended up getting 2 unlabeled bags of grain. Luckily one had rice flakes in the grain bill so I was able to tell.

SamuraiSquirrel · 08-26-2010, 12:42 PM

Yeah that would bug me........ but

the extra 2 oz won't kill you and I would guess it is the mix of grains but I have no way of knowing this. Just brew it. Pliny's all about the hops.

You can email more beer for a little piece of mind and they might say that they package all the grains mixed together. Or you might even get some free grain on it if it sounds like they screwed up and offer to send you the grain..............

I had to email the support once and they were extremely helpful.

**winvarin** · 09-02-2010, 09:33 PM

The "unknown" is what irritated me more than anything. Since the grain bag was mislabled anyway, even though the weight was right, I had no way to tell if I was getting what I was looking for.

Color and gravity turned out right. But I think going forward I may just get the grains myself at my LHBS so I have a better idea what I am putting in there