New to all grain

I'm brewing my first all grain recipe this weekend and have a few questions. I ordered a kit from northern brewer and the recipe does not give any quantities for the Saach water or mash out water. What kind of ratios should I use to get to a 5 gallon end volume? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
- Luke

I assume you mean strike volume and sparge volume. These are dependent on your grain bill. Is it possible for you to post this so we can further help you? I prefer equal volume strike/sparge and there are several formulas to help you calculate this.

Here is a link to the kit that I have already ordered

http://www.northernbrewer.com/documentation/allgrain/AG-CaribouSlobber.pdf

Luke_M said:

Here is a link to the kit that I have already ordered

http://www.northernbrewer.com/documentation/allgrain/AG-CaribouSlobber.pdf

Click to expand...

If it were mine, I would mash in with 16 quarts of water at a temp. to settle out at 152-153*F for 60-90 miin. Then batch sparge to obtain boil volume.
Hope this is what you need...

The other thing you have to take into account is the boiloff rate for your equipment. If you don't know it a decent guess is 15% per hour. If you want to be more accurate, it wouldn't take too long to run an experiment.

As far as the calculations I can give you a high level overview, but you may want to consider buying a program like Beersmith

Preboil volume is the volume you have collected at the end of the mash.

Preboil volume = volume into the fermenter / boiloff factor

You're going to want a volume into the fermenter larger than 5 gal to account for trub loss. I don't know what the NB recipe is written to, but 5.5 is probably reasonable.

So, assuming 15% boiloff per hour and a 1hour boil

Preboil volume = 5.5 / 0.85 = 6.47 gallons

Hex23 said:

Preboil volume = 5.5 / 0.85 = 6.47 gallons

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Then you work backwards from there:

Add on grain water retention to come up with your total mash water. I think a reasonable figure for that is 0.1 gal per lb grain. So for you that's about 1 gallon. So now you're up to 7.47 gallons.

Then subtract your strike (sacch) water to come up with your sparge water. As stated before 16 qts is good. So you'd need 3.47 gallons sparge water. Since this is your first AG, I recommend you batch sparge. You'll see lots of advice on how to split your sparge water, but 2 equal size batches is probably fine.

Assuming you're going to do single infusion mash with a cooler mash tun ... the other tricky thing is calculating your strike water temp. Beersmith can also help with that, but you need to know your mash tun thermal mass.

The other way is to preheat your mash tun to try to take its heat absorption out of the picture. Then you have to calculate heat loss to the grains.

Thanks a lot for the information. I'll let you know how everything turns out

Hex23 said:

Assuming you're going to do single infusion mash with a cooler mash tun ... the other tricky thing is calculating your strike water temp. Beersmith can also help with that, but you need to know your mash tun thermal mass.

The other way is to preheat your mash tun to try to take its heat absorption out of the picture. Then you have to calculate heat loss to the grains.

Click to expand...

don't get tooo caught up with thermal mass, I think its best to go over your expected strike water temp. So If I have 14 pounds of grain, I'll add 180 degree water to my tun, let it sit there for a few minutes. Stir like a mad man to get the heat down to 162ish, add my grain a bit at a time, stir until i'm saturated, until its all in. which should put me around 154. Last time I did this I droped 1/2 a degree over an hour mash.

I do all my calculations by hand. I just started using a website that does it by entering the numbers. Its the first one that actually comes close to the formula I use. If I can dig it up ill post it.

What is your brew setup? Cooler or direct fire or? How are planning on sparging?

I just built a mash tun using a Rubbermaid cooler and will be batch sparging

Luke_M said:

I just built a mash tun using a Rubbermaid cooler and will be batch sparging

Click to expand...

Sounds like my set up. Here's my suggestion - I am sure there are better ways, but most of my brew days are a variation on this:

Heat around 5-6 gallons of strike water to 170 deg F. At 170, put dough-in water in your cooler. Put in 1 quart for each pound of grain. Don't put the grain in yet... Let the hot water pre-heat your cooler for you. When water reaches 155-160 deg F, put in all of your grain. You should end up with mash around 130-135. Let this rest until the balance of your strike water is boiling.

Once strike water is boiling, add enough to get your mash to desired saccharification temp. Be careful to not overshoot and be patient. You should end up with liquor to grist ratio of 1.5 to 2.0. Don't worry about ratio - worry about the temp if anything. If its too cold, add more boiling water. If too hot, leave the lid of you cooler open and stir gently.

After sacc rest is done (60 min? Use iodine test if you aren't sure about this), you add the make-up water. I start heating it so that make up water is boiling right about when sacc rest is complete - you'll want about 4 gallons ready to use if necessary. Now the tricky part - you want to add enough water to get the gravity of the sweet wort to your desired pre-boil gravity.

Your wort will concentrate during the boil (as water evaporates away). If you have a feel for what that might be, you can calculate this a bit more exactly. I would suggest using something like 15% as a starting point. You want your pre-boil gravity to be around 15% lower than your target gravity. So... Now you start this cycle of adding boiling water, stirring gently, and check gravity until you hit your desired pre-boil gravity. A refractometer is a very handy tool to have at this stage.

You don't want to get your mash over 170 here, but my experience is that it's just about impossible to make that happen unless your making a lower gravity beer (like <1.040).

All done! Let your mash rest a bit then vorlauf for 10+ minutes before you start lautering into your kettle. Now use the length of your boil to hit the target gravity. Biggest risk is that you don't use enough make up water and you hit your target gravity too early in the boil. If that happens add more water directly to the boil. No problem!

You might find that your ending volume is a little low. I would guess that will be the case because of you are using a kit and your (our!) method is not the most efficient. I usually spend a few extra $'s on base malt to scale up the grist a little bit to make sure I get enough sugars into the wort to get both a full volume and the target gravity. No sweat, though - I would not add water to hit the volume you want and end up with a lower gravity. I usually have some light dry malt on hand in case I really mess it up and under-shoot the gravity substantially, but this should not be that case if you follow the method above.

There's probably plenty of folks smarter than me who will point out the flaws in my method. Maybe you and I will both get some good pointers!

Cheers!

jsv1204 said:

Sounds like my set up. Here's my suggestion - I am sure there are better ways, but most of my brew days are a variation on this:

Heat around 5-6 gallons of strike water to 170 deg F. At 170, put dough-in water in your cooler. Put in 1 quart for each pound of grain. Don't put the grain in yet... Let the hot water pre-heat your cooler for you. When water reaches 155-160 deg F, put in all of your grain. You should end up with mash around 130-135. Let this rest until the balance of your strike water is boiling.

Once strike water is boiling, add enough to get your mash to desired saccharification temp. Be careful to not overshoot and be patient. You should end up with liquor to grist ratio of 1.5 to 2.0. Don't worry about ratio - worry about the temp if anything. If its too cold, add more boiling water. If too hot, leave the lid of you cooler open and stir gently.

After sacc rest is done (60 min? Use iodine test if you aren't sure about this), you add the make-up water. I start heating it so that make up water is boiling right about when sacc rest is complete - you'll want about 4 gallons ready to use if necessary. Now the tricky part - you want to add enough water to get the gravity of the sweet wort to your desired pre-boil gravity.

Your wort will concentrate during the boil (as water evaporates away). If you have a feel for what that might be, you can calculate this a bit more exactly. I would suggest using something like 15% as a starting point. You want your pre-boil gravity to be around 15% lower than your target gravity. So... Now you start this cycle of adding boiling water, stirring gently, and check gravity until you hit your desired pre-boil gravity. A refractometer is a very handy tool to have at this stage.

You don't want to get your mash over 170 here, but my experience is that it's just about impossible to make that happen unless your making a lower gravity beer (like <1.040).

All done! Let your mash rest a bit then vorlauf for 10+ minutes before you start lautering into your kettle. Now use the length of your boil to hit the target gravity. Biggest risk is that you don't use enough make up water and you hit your target gravity too early in the boil. If that happens add more water directly to the boil. No problem!

You might find that your ending volume is a little low. I would guess that will be the case because of you are using a kit and your (our!) method is not the most efficient. I usually spend a few extra $'s on base malt to scale up the grist a little bit to make sure I get enough sugars into the wort to get both a full volume and the target gravity. No sweat, though - I would not add water to hit the volume you want and end up with a lower gravity. I usually have some light dry malt on hand in case I really mess it up and under-shoot the gravity substantially, but this should not be that case if you follow the method above.

There's probably plenty of folks smarter than me who will point out the flaws in my method. Maybe you and I will both get some good pointers!

Cheers!

Click to expand...

Why are you dropping your temp to 130? I assume a protein rest, but that's about 10 degrees high for the rest. Also, protein rest isn't needed. I've never used it, and don't see any benefit.

For his first time out he'd be best to skip the protein rest worry about holding his mash temp for the hour. Keep the un needed parts out for now. That way he can work with a set water/grain ratio and keep his process consistent.

It never drops to 130. It steps from 130 to sacc temp. Mostly because it helps me get the mash to a point where enzyme activity starts quickly and let's me sneak up on the desired sacc temp without having to trust in a perfect calculation of a precise single infusion of strike water to hit my optimum temp and liquor to grist ratio. It also assumes the preheat step (which helps maintain a more consistent temp through the mash). With out the preheat, a single infusion would be easier to calculate but (for me) usually ends with supplemental strike water to maintain temp and then having a higher liquor to grist ratio than I wanted.

As you point out, it would work for a protein rest. Let the temp drop more in preheat mode and shoot for 131. Let rest longer - say 20-30 mins. Work well for a stout (with rolled oats) that I made a few months ago.

Just wanted to let everyone know that my first all grain went really well this past weekend. I was able to use a trial version of BeerSmith to calculate my sparge volume. My only hiccups were a small boil over and a slightly lower SG than expected. I also ended up with around 5.5 gallons final volume rather than 5; which I assume is the reason for a lower SG. Thanks to everyone for all the tips and advice.
Happy Brewing!

Yep the bigger volume will play with your og! Glad everything else came out good. If you took good notes you'll be able to dial back your volumes and hit your post boil volumes, takes a batch or two to dial in.