1st AG mashing as we speak

Not knowing if announcing your first all grain batch is mandatory or optional, I better make it known just to cover my bases. Hopefully everything goes well. Thanks to all of the great info you brewers put on this site. It's amazing this much knowledge is free.

Congrats on your first AG brew.

Whacha brewin'

Let us know how it turns out!

Cheers,
Ken

Did you hit your mash temp?

Good luck....post if you need assistance....I'll get my thugs on it.

giono2 said:

Not knowing if announcing your first all grain batch is mandatory or optional, I better make it known just to cover my bases. Hopefully everything goes well. Thanks to all of the great info you brewers put on this site. It's amazing this much knowledge is free.

Click to expand...

Enjoy. If you have one...get some digital pics. You'll be glad you did. Brewing your first AG batch is sort of like a vacation event...you'll want to preserve the memories.

I'm doing this cream ale from NB. I am doing it single infusion rather than step until I can upgrade my setup. Regardless I missed my target by 2 degrees and have lost another degree in 1/2 an hour. I'm keeping the lid closed on my cooler though, it's really really hard not to peek.

Go have a brew and wait. There's nothing happening other than water and grain sitting in your cooler at a temp warm enough to burn you. No neat stuff like watching a carboy during primary fermentation.

Ok. Things went pretty well until after the boil. I collected 6.5 gallons of wort and boiled down to 5.5. I went to run it through my Shirron chiller and that's where things went bad. I have it set up kettle, chiller, pump, fermentor. Thing is no matter how hard I try i can't purge the air form the system, and ended up leaving 1.5 gallons in the kettle.

In most posts I've seen people set up in this order, but it doesn't make sense to me. Why don't I just connect the kettle to the pump and push the wort through the chiller? Or is there a way to purge the air at the pump?