I Joined

The ranks of All Grain brewers..

Well, I'm part way there. My first ever batch (cream ale) is in the MT as we speak (thanks to HBT for the DIY)....My sparge water is heating up on the stove, and (good thing I remember) my water hose is in the garage thawing out so it will be ready later when I need to fire up the chiller (would have been a bad time to find out my hose was frozen solid.

So far no major pitfalls. I was shooting for 152, and it hit spot on first try without any extra infusions...Hopefully I will be as lucky with my mashout/sparge temps.

Welcome to the club my friend. Now its time to start buying in bulk!!! Having everything on hand to do a spur of the moment brew is an awesome feeling. Just try not to get to hammered when brewing AG......too many steps to potentially forget

Everything went pretty well. My chiller is running right now with about 10 degrees and a whole lot of shaking left before I can pitch.

My 1056 pouch is ready to explode and it's only been smaked for about 3-4 hours.

The only thing I that could have gone better was I probably should have added another batch during sparging. I ended up with 5.5 gallons or better, but underestimated the evap. This might be a fairly "big" cream.....oh well, still happy with how well it went.

Dloucks said:

my water hose is in the garage thawing out so it will be ready later when I need to fire up the chiller (would have been a bad time to find out my hose was frozen solid.

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I did a batch last night while the snow was falling... and I totally forgot to thaw out the hose! Had to jury-rig a connection to my sink faucet. That sucked!

Well, it's in the carboy and the yeast has been pitched. Looks like I will end up with around 4 gallons instead of 5. Lesson learned. The OG is 1.050 and I believe it was supposed to be 1.040. That would make since losing 20% of my volume to evap.... I'm not going to complain about the extra ABV, however I imagine the color is going to be more amber than what I was hoping for.

The important part is that there was nothing that would prevent me from doing it again. I do need to get a bigger kettle and a crusher, but I think my process (aside from needing to use more sparge water) seemed to work pretty well.

My go for a tongue splitter next round....I should have a carboy freeing up around the 1st of the year.

Its not to late to top up the carboy with some water to get to the 5 gal mark. Use some bottled water and you should be ok, or you could boil it, chill, then add it.

I always keep a gallon of sealed bottled water on hand for topping off, boiloff rates are never entirely predictable unless you have a commercial brewhouse, which clearly ours is not.

Displaced MassHole said:

Its not to late to top up the carboy with some water to get to the 5 gal mark. Use some bottled water and you should be ok, or you could boil it, chill, then add it.

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Really? So if I boil up a gallon of water , cool it and add it to the carboy that is ok?

Well, I added close to a gallon of carbon filtered boiled tap water last night and this morning my air lock is going crazy and there is a solid inch of krausen on top of the beer. It's a beautiful thing to see two full 5g carboys sitting side by side in the closet. It will be even nicer to see a Ale pale or two sitting next to them.