MikeRLynch
Well-Known Member
This is more of a shameless plug rather than a topic, but who cares?
So after a tragic and tottaly disheartening accident with the last batch (brand new glass carboy exploded, spilling 4 hours of work on the front porch...) we were determined to make a good batch of all grain beer out of sheer spite. And this time we even did two.
We don't have any special equipment for all grain, so we use a kind of brew in a bag system. We have a 5 gallon gatorade cooler with the spigot on the bottom, and we simply line the whole thing with an oversized mesh bag. We dough in with water heated on the stove, and thats pretty much it. When the hour is up we simply open the spigot and let it run. When things start to slow down, all we do is pull up on the bag a bit and the flow starts again. We batch sparge once, we get our boil volume, and thats it! Normally we had pretty bad efficiency, around 55%. But for some reason the brew gods smiled on us (perhaps because of the sacrifice of spilled wort on the porch) and we hit a solid 72%. I'm really happy with this, and because we're hitting our numbers without spending a ton on equipment, I might just go out and get a second mash tun cooler. This way we can mash two totally seperate beers at the same time, without having to make ridiculous monthly payments to our credit cards to pay off the three tier system.
so to all you poor ass brewers, don't be disheartened! It may not look flash, but you can brew full volume all grain without spending a lot of money, or even modifying anything! Maybe someday I'll follow the directions to put a false bottom in my tun with a new metal spigot, but for now this works pretty damn well!
sorry, just had to break my arm patting my own back for a minute there. I'm done
So after a tragic and tottaly disheartening accident with the last batch (brand new glass carboy exploded, spilling 4 hours of work on the front porch...) we were determined to make a good batch of all grain beer out of sheer spite. And this time we even did two.
We don't have any special equipment for all grain, so we use a kind of brew in a bag system. We have a 5 gallon gatorade cooler with the spigot on the bottom, and we simply line the whole thing with an oversized mesh bag. We dough in with water heated on the stove, and thats pretty much it. When the hour is up we simply open the spigot and let it run. When things start to slow down, all we do is pull up on the bag a bit and the flow starts again. We batch sparge once, we get our boil volume, and thats it! Normally we had pretty bad efficiency, around 55%. But for some reason the brew gods smiled on us (perhaps because of the sacrifice of spilled wort on the porch) and we hit a solid 72%. I'm really happy with this, and because we're hitting our numbers without spending a ton on equipment, I might just go out and get a second mash tun cooler. This way we can mash two totally seperate beers at the same time, without having to make ridiculous monthly payments to our credit cards to pay off the three tier system.
so to all you poor ass brewers, don't be disheartened! It may not look flash, but you can brew full volume all grain without spending a lot of money, or even modifying anything! Maybe someday I'll follow the directions to put a false bottom in my tun with a new metal spigot, but for now this works pretty damn well!
sorry, just had to break my arm patting my own back for a minute there. I'm done