Recent content by Northcalais40

Isulate the sink with a box of 2" rigid foam insulation. You can cut it with a knife or hand saw and the tun will be more well insulated than most cooler tuns.

I now batch sparge as a matter of convenience, because it is a 4.5 hr brew day instead of a 6+hr brew day. When I fly sparge, one thing I notice is that within a few minutes of a 30-45 min sparge the water above the grainbed is crystal clear, while the out flow is still dark. This is a contrast...

Thanks, good ideas. Anyone have experience doing protien rests with rye?

I had a 18lb grain bill with 4.25 lb of rye: 13.75# 2 row pale 1# cara rye 3# Rye malt 1/4# chocolate rye 1 ton of rice hulls I could tell stirring the mash (1.1 qts/lb) that this was more gelatinous than normal. I have a cooler+braid MLT. It stuck bad. I eventually did two batch...

I don't get bad flavors from batch sparging and neither should you. The red flag that I see is you building water. Use some well water or spring water or some other natural source as a control. I may be called out as a philistene for saying so, but leave the techy nerd stuff for later in the...

I think this is wrong. From watching and reading Braukaiser's material, you can see that he doughs in at low temps to avoid balls, because the temp is below the gelatinization temp. He is demonstrating decoction mashing, which is cool and all, but is much more time consuming than single...

So... who mashes for 15 minutes based on this "study" and what is your efficiency? I don't mashout because it isn't worth it for time and grain considerations.

Cheating implies a competition with agreed upon rules.

Last night's brew went a little over volume. My carboy was full to the throat, before I added the yeast slurry. I capped it with a stopper and blow off tube but the liquid level was right to the stopper. Perhaps a little heavy handed. Cut to 24 hrs later and the blow off vessel, a quart jar...

The local brewshop in Plainfield, VT has Chocolate rye as well as some other specialty rye malts. Got me thinking.

It's hard to account for fluffyness. That is why I would weigh it prior to grinding.

Bad. Ass.

I am not a biab'er but yes I would preheat some volume of water in a separate kettle while mashing, then after squeezing the bag over your mash kettle, dunk, stir and squeeze in the second kettle for a "sparge" then combine for boil. This may be verboten in biab circles, but should up the...

have you got a bathroom scale? Fill a grocery bag with 10 scoops from a measuring cup.. Stand on the scale and subtract your weight from the total of you and the grain. You can then get a rough approximation of weight per volume.