Thanks guys, I think I'll actually spring for the barley crusher, knowing how I am, I would probably end up upgrading in a few months and letting the corona mill rust in the garage. Sorry to highjack your thread but it was pretty much the exact same issue I had and I figured keeping all the info/replies in one spot would make sense, I have contacted Midwest, waiting on a reply.
Update: Midwest has taken care of me, thanks again everyone.
So glad I came across this thread tonight. I'm planning a brew on Saturday and I just re- inspected my grains. I ordered frame MoreBeer. Last batch I did I got 65% when I had been getting 75% with NB grains. The ingredients for this weekends brew are from MoreBeer and the crush isn't fine enough for BIAB. So I called up my neighbor who has a grain mill. I'm going to head over tomorrow to run the grain through again. Hooray!
bradfordmonk said:yea, its probably just more that so much grain goes through them, that they just get out of whack if not paid close attention to. But its good they are made aware of issues so they can fix and prevent them from happening.
I ordered a Barley Crusher with the large hopper early in my all grain career. I batch sparged for about a year and have since switched to BIAB doing 10 gal batches and love it. I can't see going back. I also had poor efficiency at the beginning and it was definately related to my crush. I tried double crushing working from my standard batch sparge crush settings and didn't see much difference. Once I adjusted the mills to crush finer I hit my numbers. One caveat though. I started to experience free spinning of the rollers especially with a full hopper. The rollers just weren't picking up the grain. Reversing the drill direction slowly, not enough to loosen my drill chuck, would fix it but it became too fussy for my liking. I backed off on the roller settings just a little and the problem went away. Just thought I'd mention that.
If homebrew store crush doesn't get you all the way there you can always just up the base grain, leaving the adjuncts the same and that should work. You can do some trial and error but you'll never have complete control until you start crushing in house. This also allows you to buy 50 lb sacks of base grain for much less $, store it uncrushed and pull from it for months and months.
Having some DME on hand is also helpful. You can check your preboil gravity at the 15 minute mark. That's when I put in my Irish Moss and immersion chiller and adjust if necessary but since I bought Beersmith software and dialed in my brewery settings things seem to go so much more smooth. Haven't had to tweak gravity in a long time even with brand new recipes.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Nimbus
oh yea, i also burn my voile bag to the outside of my pot too, so definetly going to the traditional cooler to mash in.
my plan is, have a cooler with kettle screen and valve installed, line cooler with voile, mash, sparge, done.
This would more typically be called a mash-tun If you go that far just put a bazooka screen or a false bottom in and just don't use the bag anymore.
Got a kit in today from Midwest and the crush looks alot better than the last two kits I've gotten. I asked them to double crush and it looks like they did.
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