New BYO Aussi brewing article

I brewed a batch yesterday as per the article in BYO. Bought a 24x24 grain bag from MORE BEER. Worked out great. Took a hose and squirted out all the grain afterward.

I'll taste the results in a month or so. I'm definately going to do this again. If nothing else, it's a good and easy introduction to all-grain brewing.

Grain Bag - 24'' x 24'' Medium | MoreBeer

I brewed a batch yesterday as per the article in BYO.

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Which BYO issue is that? I've noticed a few homebrewers already mentioned said article.

I have tried BiaB once, and it was easy going. I used a 5-gal. paint strainer from the Home Depot.

Today I will taste said batch at a Real Ale party.

March-April 2009 issue, pp 48.

I've sewed up 2 bags and brewed 4 batches of BIAB


I've entered all 4 of them in the Bluebonnet BrewOff to get some feedback. At our recent Homebrew club social, all were well received and enjoyed.

I brewed Jamil's Belgian Pale Ale, American Amber and American IPA.

I pushed the system and did a 10 gallon batch of Blonde and found that 14 gallon pot is just a little small for all the liquid and grain so I did a modified BIAB.

Last year I experimented with no chill and had mixed results. Mostly I could not get the aroma in my beers without dry hopping them.

Other than that I think both of these techniques have merit and brewers should keep an open mind.

This is an interesting topic that is being discussed, some good points are made, and lots of things have been missed in this discussion that I'll have to get into later.

Id love to "no chill" in a conical... you could then drop out trub if you wanted to after say 24 hours.

I am itching to do this... wish I didnt have to go back to work soon.

Work is so intrusive, isnt it?

chefmike said:

Work is so intrusive, isnt it?

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Sure is!

10 char

Since I generally make a 24 hour starter for larger beers... this will work perfectly.

I can collect some of my lighter runnings and use them to make a 24 hour starter. During the 24 hours that the wort is cooling in the HDPE container, the starter is getting amped up. When the wort is cool, the starter is ready to go... no more DME, fresh wort for the starter AND it is the same as my original brew.

It'd be really interesting to do a side-by-side experiment comparing BIAB with a traditional mash-tun. I've only ever done BIAB for my all-grain beers, so I don't know whether using a mash-tun would make much difference. I suspect it probably wouldn't, but has anyone ever heard of such a comparison?

Never heard of one, nope.

I'm thinking of jumping over to AG and this BIAB method seems to be something I could do...right now as opposed to later when I can afford more equipment. I've been hesitant and I think this one fits my confidence level. I don't understand a few things though. Is there any conversion of the recipe for a standard AG to use the BIAB method? I'm thinking of trying the SS Minnow during the Big Brew Day. Here is the recipe:

SS Minnow Mild Ale—English Dark Mild – All Grain Recipe
For a 5 gallon (19 L) yield

O.G.: 1.037
F.G.: 1.012
IBU: 15

Fermentables
4.6 lb (2.1 kg) 2-Row English Pale Malt
11 oz (312 g) English Crystal 55o L
6 oz (170 g) Crystal 120o L
3 oz (85 g) British Chocolate Malt
3 oz (85 g) Brown Malt (if unavailable, substitute Biscuit Malt or Amber Malt)

Hops
0.75 oz (21 g) East Kent Golding, 5.8% Alpha Acid, for 60 minutes (If E.K. Golding is unavailable, substitute Fuggle, or Willamette hops for 15 IBU.)

¾ tsp (3 g) Irish moss, for 15 minutes

Yeast
1 package of either Wyeast 1968 London ESB Ale Yeast or White Labs WLP002 English Ale Yeast; or make a yeast starter

Directions for All-Grain Recipe
Mash grains at 156°F (69°C) and hold for 60 minutes. Sparge with 170°F (76°C) water. Collect enough runoff to end up with 5 gallons after a 60-minute boil (approximately 6.45 gallons, or 24.4 L). Bring to a boil and add the bittering hops. Boil for 45 minutes before adding the Irish moss. Boil 15 minutes. After the 60-minute boil, chill to 67-70°F (19-21°C), transfer to a fermenter, pitch the yeast and aerate well. Ferment at 67°F (19°C) for a total of one week. Rack to secondary and age for a week. Rack to keg, or add bottling sugar and bottle.

The Aussie Hombrew instructions are for a Schwartzbier recipe that I couldn't find with their search functions. The BIAB version starts with 10 gallons of water in the kettle. I'm trying to figure out if this is a 10 gallon recipe? Assuming it is, for the minnow, I could double the recipe (two of us will be splitting it anyways). Would the 90 minutes in the bag be at mash temperature and just ignore the sparge temperature? If the Schwartzbier is a 10 gallon recipe, they are using a 20 gallon pot so if it were halved to what I normally brew (5 gallons) a 10 gallon pot would be fine?

I'd love to pour through the epic thread over at Aussie, but I just recently finished every single post on EdWort's Apfelwein thread here and I don't have anymore in me.

TIA for helping convert an extractor to AG.

Daddymem said:

Is there any conversion of the recipe for a standard AG to use the BIAB method?

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No - I just use the exact same recipes as for standard AG brewing.

Daddymem said:

SS Minnow Mild Ale—English Dark Mild – All Grain Recipe
For a 5 gallon (19 L) yield
I'm trying to figure out if this is a 10 gallon recipe?

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It says "For a 5 gallon yield".

Daddymem said:

Would the 90 minutes in the bag be at mash temperature and just ignore the sparge temperature?

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Yes, that's what I'd do.

Daddymem said:

If the Schwartzbier is a 10 gallon recipe, they are using a 20 gallon pot so if it were halved to what I normally brew (5 gallons) a 10 gallon pot would be fine?

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I guess so.

Good luck with it.

Danek said:

It says "For a 5 gallon yield".

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The Minnow recipe is for 5 gallons, it's the Schwartzbier recipe included in the Aussie guidelines that I don't understand.
The Schwartzbier recipe wasn't clear on the volumes, they use 10 gallons of water (38 liters actually), then later they talk about if you have a 25 or 23 liter fermenter (6-6.5 gallons).

It sounds like basically follow an all grain recipe and use the mash temperature. I think I get it now on the volumes. If I have a 5 gallon recipe like the Minnow above, I'd want to start out with 1.6x5=8 gallons of water to account for absorption and evaporation. That gives me a full boil wort around the 5 gallons when complete. Darn those metric users!

Parker36 said:

. If you have a boil that is 75min, you have killed off almost all of the spores (99.9%)

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Which is a thousand fold reduction.

Danek said:

It'd be really interesting to do a side-by-side experiment comparing BIAB with a traditional mash-tun. I've only ever done BIAB for my all-grain beers, so I don't know whether using a mash-tun would make much difference. I suspect it probably wouldn't, but has anyone ever heard of such a comparison?

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This link was posted earlier in the thread, and it answers most of the questions people have been asking:

At time of writing, at least several thousands of litres of beer have been brewed using BIAB with many of these litres being tasted by experienced brewers. In one test, identical beer recipes were brewed side by side. One beer was batch-sparged and the other BIABed. Eight brewers were asked to triangular test the resulting beer. This means having three galsses with two of them containing the same beer and the third glass having another beer. Only two of the eight brewers picked the correct beer. Of these two, one simply guessed while the other found the BIAB beer to be slightly more astringent with slightly less body. So it is safe to say that, to date, BIAB beers are proving to be equivalent to those traditionally brewed. Time will tell if there are any limitations but if there are, you can be assured that they will be miniscule and detectable to only very advanced palates.

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A Guide To All-grain Brewing In A Bag - AussieHomeBrewer.com

Hopaholic said:

This link was posted earlier in the thread...

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Oh yeah, so it was. I read that whole thing about a year ago, but obviously didn't take that bit in. Cheers for flagging it up.

Daddymem said:

The Minnow recipe is for 5 gallons, it's the Schwartzbier recipe included in the Aussie guidelines that I don't understand.
The Schwartzbier recipe wasn't clear on the volumes, they use 10 gallons of water (38 liters actually), then later they talk about if you have a 25 or 23 liter fermenter (6-6.5 gallons).

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Sorry, I see what you mean. Yeah, the Aussie instructions give a final yield of more than five gallons of wort. As you say, there's quite a lot of liquid loss due to evaporation, as well as the liquid retained in the grains, so exact starting volumes are hard to gauge - but from personal experience, when I've used BIAB I've found that starting with 33 litres gets me to five gallons of wort in the fermenter.

Sweet, thanks! I may give this a shot soon. Sounds like my 7 gallon kettle is too small though...time to upgrade.

Daddymem said:

Sweet, thanks! I may give this a shot soon. Sounds like my 7 gallon kettle is too small though...time to upgrade.

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Your 7 gallon kettle will do just fine. I used a 7 gallon kettle yesterday with 11 pounds of grain. Put about 6 gallons of water in your kettle and then slowly add your grain. I used a 2 cup measuring cup to drop my grain in. Your grain will end up absorbing water which stops it from overflowing. Make sure to stir well after a few pours. Once all of your grain is in, you'll be able to add more water. I ended up with a little over 6 gallons for my boil.

Good luck.

Danek said:

Oh yeah, so it was. I read that whole thing about a year ago, but obviously didn't take that bit in. Cheers for flagging it up.

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This was the first time I've seen the thread, so I've picked through the entire thing with a fine toothed comb... and the whole other thread too!

I'm in an apartment, so finding space for HLT/MLT/Kettle is tough... with this method I'll be able to try all grain for my 3rd batch of beer ever. A whole world has been opened up to me, just like that!

Rezilynt said:

Your 7 gallon kettle will do just fine. I used a 7 gallon kettle yesterday with 11 pounds of grain. Put about 6 gallons of water in your kettle and then slowly add your grain. I used a 2 cup measuring cup to drop my grain in. Your grain will end up absorbing water which stops it from overflowing. Make sure to stir well after a few pours. Once all of your grain is in, you'll be able to add more water. I ended up with a little over 6 gallons for my boil.

Good luck.

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Cool. I think I might try a simple recipe on my own before big brew day.

My house beer is one of the siplest I've ever created, but without a doubt the most popular.
10 pounds 2-row for pale or Maris Otter for amber-toast 2 pounds 15 mins at 350F before milling
1 pound Carapils
Mash at 152
Hops:
1 oz Kent Goldings for 60 min
.5 oz each Mt. hood and Hallertau for 20 mins
Neutral yeast, right now I use Nottingham
I've brewed this one for 9 years now, it's pretty much always on tap. When I get home I'll post a couple of my special recipes. I know exactly where you're coming from.
This was suggested to me on another forum and it sounded good, I think I go the amber route.

Daddymem said:

My house beer is one of the siplest I've ever created, but without a doubt the most popular.

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That makes it an excellent test batch for the method... very interested to hear your results if you end up doing a BIAB batch of it.

In the BYO article it looks as if the grain bag is being lifted by a pulley. For those who have done this, is a pully set up necessary or is it pretty easy to pick up the bag, drain it, and move it out of the way? It says it's only ~20 lbs when wet. That doesn't sound like a lot, but when you have to hold it over a hot pot of wort and drain it I can maybe see that being a slight workout.

When I lifted the bag out it was a pain in the back. Next one I'm going to rig a pulley and sanitized nylon rope to tie up the bag to drain and drip.

No need to sanitize the rope. The boil will sanitize everything.

Kai

Austin_LSU said:

In the BYO article it looks as if the grain bag is being lifted by a pulley. For those who have done this, is a pully set up necessary or is it pretty easy to pick up the bag, drain it, and move it out of the way? It says it's only ~20 lbs when wet. That doesn't sound like a lot, but when you have to hold it over a hot pot of wort and drain it I can maybe see that being a slight workout.

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A pulley isn't necessary (I don't have one) but the bag is pretty damn heavy. I tried holding it over the kettle and letting it drain for a few batches, but that got to be too much like hard work. On my last few goes I put it on top of an inverted colander in a spare ale pail, and then once most of the liquid has drained out, I put the grain bag in the sink and pour the drained liquid from the ale pail back into the brew kettle.

I pulled the bag out and let it drip for a minute and then put it in another SS pot I have (a cheap, very cheap, 5 gallon one). While I was getting the main pot to a boil, I could hold the bag over the second, cool pot and not worry about getting burned. This worked out fine.

And then, once I fished my "false bottom" (a vegetable steamer thing) from my main pot and put it in the cheap pot and put the bag on it. This allowed it to drain some without me holding it up.

In both cases, just add the wort from the second pot into the main pot. This was a lot easier on my back than holding the bag over the hot boil kettle.

Cool. I'm really curious to try this out. Now I need to find a place for a pully. I'm not exactly the biggest guy.

My 6 gallon HDPE cooling jug/fermentor is on its way from Lima, OH today.

http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/va...ory_name=25&product_id=13648&variant_id=75032

bakins said:

I pulled the bag out and let it drip for a minute and then put it in another SS pot I have (a cheap, very cheap, 5 gallon one). While I was getting the main pot to a boil, I could hold the bag over the second, cool pot and not worry about getting burned. This worked out fine.

And then, once I fished my "false bottom" (a vegetable steamer thing) from my main pot and put it in the cheap pot and put the bag on it. This allowed it to drain some without me holding it up.

In both cases, just add the wort from the second pot into the main pot. This was a lot easier on my back than holding the bag over the hot boil kettle.

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This is exactly how I did it, and worked great. Out of curiosity, did you raise the temperature of the mash to 170 degrees (i.e., mash out), before pulling out and draining the bag?

Sorry to drag you all back to the botulism argument, but you are all missing one really important fact: the cubes used to store the wort are made of polyethylene, and polyethylene allows a lot of oxygen through it. So, once the wort is cooled, oxygen will to permeate the wall of the cube, dissolve in the wort, and the wort will become oxygen-saturated in a matter of days.

I did some math based on the oxygen transmission rates posted here - http://www.flextank.com.au/PDF_Files/2-Year-Update.pdf and came up with a transmission rate of about 2 ppm per day based on a full 20 liter cube, 27 cm on a side. So, in 4 days, enough oxygen could get in to saturate the wort. Voila, no spore growth since an anerobic environment is needed. I suspect the rate limiting factor is the diffusion of oxygen through the wort, not the permeation through the cube wall.

By the way, my calculations were based on a 1 mm (40 mil) wall thickness, and I suspect the cubes are less than half that, which increases the amount of oxygen that can permeate in 24 hours.

I surmise that no Aussie homebrewers have botulinized themselves for several reasons, none of which have to do with their robust immune systems... Presence of oxygen, sterilization of the wort by boiling, followed by natural pasteurization as the wort slow cools, and competition by yeast when a true anaerobic environment is created during the first phase of yeast growth.

I'm not sure why the cube use directions suggest minimizing air space, unless it is the originators of the idea didn't know about polyethylene's ability to transmit oxygen. Anyone know why? Fatgodzilla?

Well, I guess that kinda blows a big hole in the concept of "cubed" wort being stable for a long time... unless the oxygen doesn't really have any negative effects on it...

AiredAle said:

Presence of oxygen, sterilization of the wort by boiling, followed by natural pasteurization as the wort slow cools, and competition by yeast when a true anaerobic environment is created during the first phase of yeast growth.

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A few problems with this logic:

Oxygen saturated wort will oxidize, this is a non-controversial fact. Either the wort is not becoming oxygen saturated, or the Aussie home brewers like stale beer even more than the American home brewers.

Boiling does not sterilize.

Pasteurization is not effective against spore forming organisms.

Somewhere in this thread someone talked about the length of boil and destrying spores. Basically stating that 75 minutes and longer and 99% of spores were destroyed.

I for one always boil 90 mins.

Also with the O2 permeability... are your calcuations for LDPE? HDPE? Both? Neither?

I am trying this on my next brew, my HDPE container/fermentor is in the mail. If it fails, oh well! If it doesn't, oh well!

I will post my findings here regardless. We can sit here and speculate all we want, but since Aussies have been winning competitions with "no chill" beers, Id have to say that our specuatling about how horrible it is, is just that... speculation for now.

We really KNOW nothing about it.

The Pol said:

Somewhere in this thread someone talked about the length of boil and destrying spores. Basically stating that 75 minutes and longer and 99% of spores were destroyed.

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99.9%, which is far far far far from being sanitation, let alone sterilization.

Oh, that is good enough for me.

I used to pick my nose as a kid.

I am still here.

Well, just fyi you could rinse your carboy with urine and achieve a comparable level of microbial reduction, seriously.

The rule of thumb for commercial food production is a 12 log(10) reduction on C. Botulinum, that would take 12*25 minutes at wort boiling temperature or 5 hours.

Good thing I am not making commercial food then, huh! :rockin:

A few problems with this logic:

Oxygen saturated wort will oxidize, this is a non-controversial fact. Either the wort is not becoming oxygen saturated, or the Aussie home brewers like stale beer even more than the American home brewers.

Boiling does not sterilize.

Pasteurization is not effective against spore forming organisms.

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I don't agree that "Oxygen saturated wort will oxidize, this is a non-controversial fact." is non-controversal. Certainly hot wort will oxidize, but hot wort won't pick up much oxygen under the conditions we are arguing about, so no oxygen will be present for oxidation. Room temp wort picks up oxygen, but doesn't appear to oxidize, since the reasons stated not to over oxygenate are due to yeast metabolism not chemical oxidation.

I am not suggesting that each of these factors is independently responsible for the lack of dead Aussies, but that in combination they reduce potential botulinis growth to the point that it isn't a worry. Though, on reflection, if O2 is present, the spores won't grow, that at least isn't controversial.

My main point is that oxygen will go through the cube wall, in quantities large enough to saturate the wort in a few days.

Pol,

I used the data for HDPE since it has the lowest O2 transmission rate of the three standard types of PE. I don't know for sure which grade is used in the cubes, so I chose the one with the lowest OTR to make my calculations.

Oh, Pol, I say, go for it and let us know what you learn.