First Brew!! An All-Grain!

A friend, new brewer and new HBT member Neil is coming by to try brewing his first beer outside of a couple mr beer kits, it is an All-Grain Watermelon Wheat, I have my gear set up, but he will be running the show, I get to play brewers assistant! Sure I will watch over him, but all the decisions are his to make, and any mistakes are his as well!
I will post up how the day goes, and get him on here to let everyone know how easy or difficult brewing all grain is from a noob perspective.

Wish him the best of luck today!!!

azscoob said:

A friend, new brewer and new HBT member Neil is coming by to try brewing his first beer outside of a couple mr beer kits, it is an All-Grain Watermelon Wheat, I have my gear set up, but he will be running the show, I get to play brewers assistant! Sure I will watch over him, but all the decisions are his to make, and any mistakes are his as well!
I will post up how the day goes, and get him on here to let everyone know how easy or difficult brewing all grain is from a noob perspective.

Wish him the best of luck today!!!

Click to expand...

Do it yourself. My first brew was all-grain and I did it all by myself after doing sufficient research. It is really simple when you break it down.

Good luck!

I did indeed start brewing by doing an all grain batch and have never regretted it, now its his turn on my equipment doing his first batch, also an all grain recipe. I have 40-50 batches so far, he has assisted me in several of the more recent ones, now its my turn to play assistant!

Very cool! Looking forward to hearing how it goes...

azscoob said:

A friend, new brewer and new HBT member Neil is coming by to try brewing his first beer outside of a couple mr beer kits, it is an All-Grain Watermelon Wheat, I have my gear set up, but he will be running the show, I get to play brewers assistant! Sure I will watch over him, but all the decisions are his to make, and any mistakes are his as well!
I will post up how the day goes, and get him on here to let everyone know how easy or difficult brewing all grain is from a noob perspective.

Wish him the best of luck today!!!

Click to expand...

What a great friend to have! Cheers to you for helping a fledgling brewer, I wish I had the same when I got started

Yes All-Grain just means extra reading, but it is not difficult to get the hang of the general technique. Afterward it's just perfecting that technique. Good luck!

As you know, AG brewing sounds a lot harder than it really is. Just be patient and pay attention to the temps, water amounts, sparge rate and time of each step and it's pretty hard to screw it up.

Tell him not to be scared of the boogie man that is AG brewing... It is a daunting undertaking, but once you do it, you will wonder what the big deal is...

Ok everyone, when you forget to plug in the laptop, updating while brewing is not easy, so here is how it went, I assisted in milling the grain on my mill, set to .035 200rpm drill to turn the rollers, the strike water was heating while he was checking out the equipment and verbally going over the steps, this resulted in overshooting the target temp by 20 degrees, his solution was to stir to assist cooling while adding some ice.. panic averted! nailed his strike temp and was within 1 degree of his mash temp! after an uneventful mash and mashout I reminded him how to vourlauf and we began to fill the keggle, his decision was to split the sparge water into 2 seperate sparges because 4 gallons into 8.75lb of grain seemed too thin to him. (I think I drilled the water/grain ratio into him over the past few brewdays). overall everything went well, the only snafu was irish moss and immersion chiller was forgotten about and was added with 1 minute to go in the boil, so the boil was continued for another 5 minutes and chilling began, I suggested rehydrating the dry yeast and told him to follow the package directions to do so. Once the wart was down to pitching temps, the rehydrated yeast was pitched into the aerated wort and as of 5:20pm, his first batch went in the fermentation fridge!

His first batch on a system that is fairly dialed in netted him 83% efficency.

His thoughts in the end were that he was nervous before the brew for no good reason, "if I can follow a recipe, read a thermometer, and watch a timer I got this no problem"

I can agree with that!