New to all grain
 

I'm brewing my first all grain recipe this weekend and have a few questions. I ordered a kit from northern brewer and the recipe does not give any quantities for the Saach water or mash out water. What kind of ratios should I use to get to a 5 gallon end volume? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
- Luke

I assume you mean strike volume and sparge volume. These are dependent on your grain bill. Is it possible for you to post this so we can further help you? I prefer equal volume strike/sparge and there are several formulas to help you calculate this.

Here is a link to the kit that I have already ordered

http://www.northernbrewer.com/documentation/allgrain/AG-CaribouSlobber.pdf

If it were mine, I would mash in with 16 quarts of water at a temp. to settle out at 152-153*F for 60-90 miin. Then batch sparge to obtain boil volume.
Hope this is what you need...

The other thing you have to take into account is the boiloff rate for your equipment. If you don't know it a decent guess is 15% per hour. If you want to be more accurate, it wouldn't take too long to run an experiment.

As far as the calculations I can give you a high level overview, but you may want to consider buying a program like Beersmith

Preboil volume is the volume you have collected at the end of the mash.

Preboil volume = volume into the fermenter / boiloff factor

You're going to want a volume into the fermenter larger than 5 gal to account for trub loss. I don't know what the NB recipe is written to, but 5.5 is probably reasonable.

So, assuming 15% boiloff per hour and a 1hour boil

Preboil volume = 5.5 / 0.85 = 6.47 gallons

Then you work backwards from there:

Add on grain water retention to come up with your total mash water. I think a reasonable figure for that is 0.1 gal per lb grain. So for you that's about 1 gallon. So now you're up to 7.47 gallons.

Then subtract your strike (sacch) water to come up with your sparge water. As stated before 16 qts is good. So you'd need 3.47 gallons sparge water. Since this is your first AG, I recommend you batch sparge. You'll see lots of advice on how to split your sparge water, but 2 equal size batches is probably fine.

Assuming you're going to do single infusion mash with a cooler mash tun ... the other tricky thing is calculating your strike water temp. Beersmith can also help with that, but you need to know your mash tun thermal mass.

The other way is to preheat your mash tun to try to take its heat absorption out of the picture. Then you have to calculate heat loss to the grains.

Thanks a lot for the information. I'll let you know how everything turns out

don't get tooo caught up with thermal mass, I think its best to go over your expected strike water temp. So If I have 14 pounds of grain, I'll add 180 degree water to my tun, let it sit there for a few minutes. Stir like a mad man to get the heat down to 162ish, add my grain a bit at a time, stir until i'm saturated, until its all in. which should put me around 154. Last time I did this I droped 1/2 a degree over an hour mash.

I do all my calculations by hand. I just started using a website that does it by entering the numbers. Its the first one that actually comes close to the formula I use. If I can dig it up ill post it.