asterix404
Well-Known Member
So I did my nth or so all grain batch where n is the number of times to actually do an all grain and work the kinks out. My process is fairly straight forward:
1) get my grain (most likely milled)
2) boil water and heat up the tun
3) heat up between 1qt and 1.25qt water to hit a strike temp of about 150deg in my converted cooler/tun (54qt capacity terrible insulation, cheep POS but...)
3) wrapt the tun in bedding. I have now gotten heat loss to less than 1deg per hour and half. I am very happy about this. Typically I will try to hit a strike temp of 151, by the end it's about 150.
4) heat equal part sparge water to hit a temp of about 168 in the tun. (If I heated up 3g for the strike at 1qt/lb I heat up 4g to sparge, this I have found mostly hard with high grav beers but I make do.)
5) Boil until I have about 5g in my brewpot
6) cool and put it in my primary with yeast.
7) Excellent bubbling, great beer.
I did this with the last batch I did and I actually took OG readings, FG readings, temperature and temp calibrated everything. After doing all of this I saw that I had about 72-75% extraction efficiency. I hit my mark (off by about .001 sg on the wort) but I didn't think the efficiency was very good.
I think after doing some reading it's either that my mash tun or the grain grind. My mash tun is a converted cooler with the mesh screen tube. The screen does not go from end to end, the cooler is about 2ft wide and the screen goes about a foot in. I was told that this is suboptimal and should get a second screen, cut of the end of the first one, attach the second one and that should help. Is this true?
If it is the grain grinding problem (or if that could help) I tried to follow the "how to brew" guide once and got a miserably stuck sparge. Most likely I ground the barley too fine and with the wheat I didn't use rice hulls. I am sort of looking for tips to get the barley to not have shredded hulls but be ground finer, any suggestions on how to do this? Should I get it just within the point of having shredded hulls and not? With the wheat I am always going to use rice hulls if the wheat is more than 10% of the grain bill.
Given my setup, what other recomendations could people give me where I could improve efficiency.
Thanks!
1) get my grain (most likely milled)
2) boil water and heat up the tun
3) heat up between 1qt and 1.25qt water to hit a strike temp of about 150deg in my converted cooler/tun (54qt capacity terrible insulation, cheep POS but...)
3) wrapt the tun in bedding. I have now gotten heat loss to less than 1deg per hour and half. I am very happy about this. Typically I will try to hit a strike temp of 151, by the end it's about 150.
4) heat equal part sparge water to hit a temp of about 168 in the tun. (If I heated up 3g for the strike at 1qt/lb I heat up 4g to sparge, this I have found mostly hard with high grav beers but I make do.)
5) Boil until I have about 5g in my brewpot
6) cool and put it in my primary with yeast.
7) Excellent bubbling, great beer.
I did this with the last batch I did and I actually took OG readings, FG readings, temperature and temp calibrated everything. After doing all of this I saw that I had about 72-75% extraction efficiency. I hit my mark (off by about .001 sg on the wort) but I didn't think the efficiency was very good.
I think after doing some reading it's either that my mash tun or the grain grind. My mash tun is a converted cooler with the mesh screen tube. The screen does not go from end to end, the cooler is about 2ft wide and the screen goes about a foot in. I was told that this is suboptimal and should get a second screen, cut of the end of the first one, attach the second one and that should help. Is this true?
If it is the grain grinding problem (or if that could help) I tried to follow the "how to brew" guide once and got a miserably stuck sparge. Most likely I ground the barley too fine and with the wheat I didn't use rice hulls. I am sort of looking for tips to get the barley to not have shredded hulls but be ground finer, any suggestions on how to do this? Should I get it just within the point of having shredded hulls and not? With the wheat I am always going to use rice hulls if the wheat is more than 10% of the grain bill.
Given my setup, what other recomendations could people give me where I could improve efficiency.
Thanks!