All grain brew

I have done several kits brews with malts and such and want to give all grain brewing a try. Any suggestions?

Get a bigger mash tun..

Read up on it in you favorite brewing book. How to Brew is a great resource, as well as Homebrewing for Dummies. There are many threads in the AG forum. Read through them.

The actual process is not any harder than Extract brewing. There is a small amount of advance planning in order to know how much water and grain to use when, and what temp, etc.

There are three basic types of AG brewing:

1. Partial Mash. Mash a percentage of grains and add some extract.
2. All Grain. Mash all of the grains. No extract.
3. Brew in a Bag. AG, but there is no manifold or false bottom. Mash in a kettle with a bag lining it. Heat as needed and then drain bag and rinse in a saparate kettle to sparge. Cheap and easy.

Google that stuff. You can do grain and water calculations on paper or give Beersmith or one of those softwares a try to help.

I highly recommend taking an existing recipe and following it. That way you get a chance to do the manual labor, but don't have to worry about the recipe and measurement calculations.

Best of all, it's really not hard. Most people wish they had gone to AG long before, once they do it. After the mash and sparge, the rest of the process is exactly the same as full boil extract.

Awesome. Thx all

This thread totally answered all of my next brew questions!! Ha! I just finished bottling my First Bock Munton's Brew Kit in a temp controlled fridge.. This one turned out so well that I wanna do another brew.. But trying to decide which kind still... I guess.. Ha. Any who... Thanks for this thread! I will be subbing in more often to see what type of brew you went with... As for me, still trying to figure if an AG or Extract will be best for my second.. I think I am gonna dive right in and do an AG..

Cheers!
& Good Luck!!

Within the last month I have done my first and second AG. Now I am retarded and it was crazy easy! I do suggest you keep some DME around in case you have lower than expected gravity.

I'd recommend trying BIAB first, since it's by far the cheapest and easiest route to get into all-grain brewing. It won't require all of the extra equipment, just a mesh bag and maybe an extra pot to heat sparge water.

A few tips regarding BIAB:
Make sure to double-crush your grains and use a large enough bag for your pot. When draining, squeeze what you can out of the grains to get the best efficiency. Some people don't sparge when doing BIAB brewing, but I've done dunk-sparging (just heat sparge water, as you would with traditional AG brewing, and after draining the bag, dunk it into the sparge water for 10-15 minutes, then squeeze the bag and add the runnings to your kettle). Last time was only my second BIAB attempt, and (according to my calculations) I hit 89% extraction efficiency. That's pretty unusual, I'm sure, but it's possible. Have an extra, clean bucket handy for holding your sparge water and dunking, or just to keep the bag from dripping all over the place. And just use a small pot lid to press/squeeze the bag.

Going full-blown AG, you'll be pouring quite a bit of cash at the equipment. Larger kettle, HLT, MLT, tubing, pumps, coolers, burners, etc. Try BIAB first to see if you think you'll like it, then worry about shelling out for traditional AG. You may find you just want to stick with BIAB, or use it to do partial/mini-mash brews.

For tried and true award winning recipes grab Zainasheff's book Brewing Classic Styles. All of the recipes are extract or AG so you can choose and there is a recipe or two for every single beer style.

helibrewer said:

For tried and true award winning recipes grab Zainasheff's book Brewing Classic Styles. All of the recipes are extract or AG so you can choose and there is a recipe or two for every single beer style.

Click to expand...

I just bought another copy. Mine was pretty worn so I let a friend keep it.