A Day of Firsts! First AG, First on new rig...

first 10gal. batch, first brewing injury. All in all a good day!

About 7 months ago I started building an all electric brew rig for my transition to all grain brewing. I don't have propane tanks or burners and didn't really want them. So after reading a lot and copying from others who went before me I finally completed the new set up last week. Today was my first time brewing all grain. I chose to try 10 gallons of BierMuncher's Centennial Blonde.

I also used BeerSmith for the first time on this brew and it was pretty much spot on. Calculated all my temperatures and volumes, and the only thing that was off was my efficiency. I left the default brewhouse efficiency of 72%, but I calculated closer to 63%. My OG ended up at 1.038 instead of 1.045, but all in all a very enjoyable morning of brewing!

I did however get some hot wort on the back of my hand, burned myself pretty good. I will post some pictures and a play by play of my brew day shortly. Perhaps someone can suggest a way to improve my efficiency, or just tell me a better way of doing things for next time.

Brew Day! My new electric set up consists of a keggle HLT with HERMS coil, 10 gal. cooler MLT with SS braid, and keggle BK. HLT and BK have 5500W elements. I have 30 amp service so I can only run one at a time. For now I only have one pump, but after today I will be getting a second soon. Did not use the HERMs because I only have the one pump.

Started my day by loading BierMuncher's Centennial Blonde recipe into BeerSmith. I decided to go big for my first brew and make 10 gallons. LHBS weighed and milled the grain, 17.25 lbs. I weighed and labeled my hop additions, rehydrated two packs of S-05 yeast, and started heating my strike water to 162F.

BeerSmith recommended 23.9 qt water @ 162.5 for mash, so once the water was at temp I pumped 6 gallons into my MLT, then added grain while stirring and stirring and stirring. Dropped my thermometer probe into the mix and it read a perfect 152F! BeerSmith knows its stuff! Set timer for 60 minutes and let it do its thing. I did open the MLT once to stir some more.

I set the HLT to heat sparge water to 175F. I was batch sparging, and BeerSmith said two sparges of 4.62 gal each. After 60 minute mash the probe temp was still at 149F. I hooked the pump to the MLT and recirculated to vorlauf, then pumped to my BK. I got a full 4 gallons. Next up I pumped 4.6 gallons of 175F water into the MLT, stirred like crazy, and let settle for a couple of minutes. Vorlauf again and pump to BK. Finally repeat with a second 4.6 gallon sparge. I got a total of 12.5 gallons in the BK, just what BeerSmith said I would. There was only a few ounces of fluid left in the MLT. I took a gravity reading of that leftover and it was 1.018. A little high I thought. Gravity of the 12.5 gallons pre boil was 1.034, BeerSmith had predicted 1.039. What does everyone do with all this spent grain?

I cranked up the heat in the BK and had a nice rolling boil in less than 20 minutes. According to BeerSmith I would end up with 11.44 gallons after a 60 minute boil. There was certainly lots of steam. It was already in the high 80's with 100% humidity and sporadic rain showers, I never realized how much heat is thrown off while doing a full 12 gallon boil. Made all my hop additions, set the IC in place and added Irish moss with 15 minutes to go and turned on the pump to sanitize and whirlpool.

Sounds like a great day!

As far as spent grains, my dog eats some and the compost gets most of them.

It definitely gets hot and steamy when brewing! Even in my cool climate, it gets like a Turkish sauna if I don't have a fan blowing with lots of ventilation.

When the boil was finished I started the water flow to the IC. I collected the first 10 gallons of hot water to clean with. Temp dropped pretty quickly, but I could only get the temp down to about 90F. My water just isn't that cold here in FLA. After chilling I pumped the wort to my fermenter and slipped it into the fermentation chamber to finish cooling before pitching the yeast. I had a lot of trub in the bottom of my brew kettle, but clean up was simple and quick, much better than I had hoped. OG ended up at 1.038 instead of the 1.045 the recipe calls for. I also had about 10.5 gallons into the fermenter so I guess I wasn't boiling off as quickly as BeerSmith thought I would be. That I can correct for next time. Other than that all of BeerSmith's numbers seemed right on. If I can just increase my efficiency I will be right where I need to be.

So I like all grain brewing. I love my new system. I have a bit of a learning curve, but over all it was a great day. Oh yeah, except for getting hot wort on my hand. That's another thing to fix for next time.

It's like a trophy! Look what I got!lol

Nice looking setup man. And congrats on the day of firsts...minus sustaining an injury.