If you need a laugh, read this....

Lemme tell you about my first all-grain experience....last night....and this morning. I order all the ingredients for a Guinness clone, build all my equipment and get it all ready to go. A buddy and his wife come over to have dinner and afterwards we get started. Time: about 7:30. My buddy got a huge (gotta be 15-20 gallon) pot and an enormous burner as a gift, so we decide this will be our boil kettle. We heat the water up for the mash (about 1.25 qt/lb...which seems to take a while. Finally, the water hits 163 degrees and we stir in the grains and water in the mash tun and let it sit for an hour. With about 20 minutes left in the mash, we start heating the water for the HLT, 5 gallons. Lets just say it took longer than 20 minutes....ALOT longer! SO after about a 90-120 minute mash, the sparge water hits 170 degrees. I had already recirculated, so we began the (fly) sparge. 5 gallons was BARELY enough sparge water, and an anticipated 45 minute sparge....took about 10 minutes. Obviously we ran the water too fast. BUT all is fine, we have 6 gallons of super dark wort that looks about like it should, so we start the heat to get it to boil..... Well...after ANOTHER HOUR...with the lid ON, the wort starts to barely roll...we give it another 15 minutes till we are sure it's boiling, add the hops, leave the top off, set the timer and go inside....watch some Turtle Man. With about 20 minutes left, we go outside and find.....the pot not boiling! At this point, it is 2AM in the morning and we don't know why the pot is not heating up like it should...so we get to looking at the burner. Apparently, you aren't supposed to use the metal deflector over the flame...because when we moved it out of the way and let the flame hit the pot....miracles! So we put the wort chiller in (to sterilize) and let the wort boil another 20 minutes. We then cooled down the wort...blah blah blah...finally got it in the bucket. Took a gravity reading before we pitched the yeast and low and behold we hit the EXACT gravity predicted in the recipe. We also had EXACTLY 5 gallons of wort. I'm not sure how this is going to taste with so much going wrong, but the final wort volume and gravity reading gives me a little hope. All this because we didn't slide the little metal piece out of the way of the burner....go ahead and say it...MORONS!!! I got to bed at 3:30AM and I had to be at work today by 9! I think my buddy called in sick. Any opinions on how BAD I may have screwed this up are welcome! NOT a pleasant first all-grain experience....

Good story, thanks for sharing, it gave me a good morning laugh! I am sorry your first experience didn't go quite so well but it can only get better.

Looks like my first AG batch will be over a loong weekend, lol. I'm sure it will turn out fine!

Worst case scenario it tastes like a canned kit, lol

If you hit your volumes and gravity numbers, and got good conversion (hard to see how you wouldn't have, with that long a mash), you're certainly making beer. However, with such a long, cool mash (couldn't have been that warm only heating your strike water to 163, and would inevitably lose a few degrees after 120 minutes, even in a cooler), you're going to have a lot more fermentable sugars and a lot fewer dextrines and other sweet/mouthfeely goodies, which will make for a dryer, thinner beer than you were aiming for.

RDWHAHB -- you're brewing Guinness Light.

Besides for it being a PITA, it doesn't sound like you did anything that would keep you from having a great beer. You kinda lucked out with the style and hopping schedule. A lengthy boil is true to the original guinness recipes and the utilization for hops pretty much levels out at 60 minutes.

Obviously, you would like to get it to a boil faster than that and get a nice strong hot break. It isn't like you are going to notice any clarity issues in jet black beer though. It probably won't age well either, but who cares. It isn't a brew you would want to keep around for a year anyway.

At this early stage of your brewing life I would not even use the term mistake when describing your first brew "night". I recall something about S*** happening???

It was a "learning experience" and once it's fermented, carbonated, bottled/kegged and finally conditioned you can all sit around laughing at that first night and giving each other high fives for making beer.

bosco

Thanks guys! I guess I need to stop and look at the positives....my homemade mash tun and cpvc manifold performed flawlessly as did my homemade wort chiller. I now realize why people recommend a 10 gallon HLT...which i will be getting soon. I'm not totally hopeless about the beer being decent too!

LOL - I wish I could say I've only had one early AM brewing session. I've had my share of brewing sessions going looooooong. It definitely helps with your skills on improvisation and disaster recovery . Beers seem to always turn out great though, so it is worth it.

Three things I've learned - keep a backup propane tank full at all times, always check your valves before adding liquid, and try to avoid building equipment on brew day.

Oh, and don't multitask when heating small amounts of of water in large HLT ... unless you want your sight glass to become modern art. They get VERY hot.

Welcome to the AG club!

Sounds exactly my first all grain, except a lot more went wrong. If I went into details, you would realize you were a lot better off then we were. I think we started at 9pm and went to bed at 4am.

Worst part is, the beer was undrinkable. Hopefully you have better luck!

my first all grain went about the same i think i started about 5 and got done 3ish

brewguyver said:

avoid building equipment on brew day.

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HAHAHA where the hell were you this past Sunday when I was cutting the top off of my 1/2 barrel and it took 100% more time than I thought it would. (10 minutes my ass. Took over an hour while getting all my other crap in line and keeping things going!)

I blame Turtleman.

brewguyver said:

...and try to avoid building equipment on brew day.

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+1 to that... just last weekend completed final assembly of my (first) AG rig for my (first) AG batch. So far, so good, I guess we'll see how she turns out... and, yes, on the plus side, it can't end up worse than our preceding, barely drinkable can batches...

hahahaha sounds about right.. my first AG i had my carboy in a cold shower at 2 am because apparently it takes a long time to cool 5 gals of liquid!!!!! i think i pitched yeast at about 26c lol, had to goto bed

I don´t see anything wrong you just described a regular brew day for me...

What is this turtleman show you speak of?

nutty_gnome said:

What is this turtleman show you speak of?

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The show is actually called "Call of the Wildman"....it's about this Kentucky redneck/hillbilly that catches wild animals with his bare hands....kinda cheesy actually. I prefer Swamp People....

At least you hit your volumes. After the boil, my 1st AG came in about 1.2gal under.

Interesting. I have a 15 gallon boilermaker that came with a rectangular piece of stainless steel. I assumed it is a heat sheild to protect the sight glass and valve from direct flame, so In place it under the edge of the pot centered on same. Is that not how its supposed to be used?

Sounds like a pretty good first AG batch. Congrats!

Could have gone a lot worse. I remember one of my first (extract) batches several years ago, I didn't have a wort chiller so I decided to put the 200F wort in the refrigerator to cool it down. Any engineers on the thread want to take a guess as to what happened when I put a 40lb pot of hot wort on a cold glass refrigerator shelf? Needless to say, catastrophic failure. I caught the pot as the shelf exploded in a shower of glass fragments, sloshed a couple of bottles' worth of hot wort all over my arm (second degree burns from my pinkie to my elbow), and then stayed up for the next four hours cooling the beer in a tepid bath. Needless to say, it wasn't the best beer I've made, but I drank every damned drop of it.

So, look on the bright side, you did a lot better than me!