First All-Grain Today

I'm doing my first all-grain today, after a few weeks of equipment buying and learning some more from this forum. I think I've got my process down in my head pretty well, as well as on paper, so wish me luck. I can probably attribute any success to reading everyone's posts here and any mishaps to, well, not reading some posts...well thanks for the help up until this point and I'll thank everyone again when that last piece of equipment is back in the closet!

Good luck.

Take some pics of the day.

Way to go! I'm sure your experience with chemystree will help. The first AG is sometimes messy but I'm sure you'll do fine. Make a plan/timeline and don't get distracted and things will work out fine. Don't stress over a few degrees one way or the other on your mash temp, either. Oh - and take hydro readings so we can tell you to RDWHAHB after you're done.

I hope you have help so he can remind you what's next and to help with things that need to be done. It's lots of fun if you have help. He can take the pictures when you screw up too.

Or you can just stream it live online so we can give you pointers as you go along!

After last week, pics just ain't gonna cut it anymore....They're so 20th century...or at least so last month.


Best of luck!

Ok, its been like 8 hours....you should be done and cleaned up by now.

How'd it go? I bet you learned a lot! I know I did on my first AG brews. Things made way more sense when I got done.

Alright, all done! I got a little sidetracked after I finished up, but thanks to everyone who posts on here because it all went smoothly. 70% efficiency, which I'm more than happy with since that is exactly what I used as an estimate! I think I clocked in at 5 and a half hours or so, part of which I can attribute to heating all my water inside on the stove since I was too lazy to refill my propane tank and didn't want to run out mid-boil...otherwise a fun day of brewing!

Good call on the stove, I can tell you from experience it SUCKS to have to make a quick run to the store to fill up a propane tank. Congrats on your first brewday. I'm not too far in front of you as I am in the middle of my 4th AG, but I haven't had nearly as much success with eff as you have 67% is the highest I've been able to manage. Nice work!

Good job on you first all-grain!

Cheers!!!

thank you, from the looks of it my efforts were not in vain...it was also my first yeast starter and they have been really going at it!

Congrats on the first AG! I only have 2 under my belt so far and I am wondering why it took me so long to step up. AG is where the 'magic' happens.

Congrats on your leap to manhood! haha.
I am doing my first AG today. had I known it would have been this easy I'd had done it long ago.
Did you just jump extract or do PM before? I did 1 PM and I think it helped me alot with the mash/sparge procedure.
All that is next is stepping the quantity up and not having to deal with DME clumping.
Congrats again from another who recently popped his AG Cherry

^^ Was that appropriate for the website? I've had a couple brews since mash started...

hey thanks! and congrats to you on yours. i just jumped straight from extract, which meant some last minute number crunching and second-guessing right before all my water additions. i think a PM would have helped a little, but now that i've got one under my belt I had a nice learning experience. it's definitely a lot different actually heating the water and mixing and doing a full boil than just planning it. but when it was all said and done it felt good to have made the jump.

chemystree said:

...which meant some last minute number crunching and second-guessing right before all my water additions...

Click to expand...

Invest 20 bucks in Beersmith. It will make the numbers a snap, so you can worry about other things on brewday......like how many homebrews you can drink while brewing and still be able to transfer with some resemblance of sanitation and clean up afterwards!