First All grain kit questions

Yooper_Brew said:

First, it should be 1.25 QUARTS of water per pound of grain. Not gallons!

That must be a mistake in the instructions.

Anyway, you stir it well, check the temperature and make sure it's correct and cover it and walk away. You'll have conversion in an hour. Unless you have some iodine to test it, you'll just have to trust that it converts.

You don't need a hot liquor tank. It's just a holding tank for the sparge water. You can leave it in the pot, that's fine.

I'd recommend a batch sparge technique, since you don't have an HLT. All you do is vorlauf (recirculating the first couple of quarts like you said), and drain the entire mash. Quickly. Then, add have of the sparge water to the cooler, stir like crazy, vorlauf again, then drain. And do it again with the rest of the sparge water. You can drain fast, not like in the directions with the slow additions of the sparge water. This is called "batch sparging" and it's a very common way to do it- I often do my sparge like this even though I have equipment to do it the other way.

Bobby_M has a great all-grain video primer on how to do this. I'll find the link and post it here.
Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/bobbyfromnj#p/u/0/bZI5i_zNWwo

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nebben said:

"Mash grains in hot water for 60 minutes"

Wow. The instructions are definitely helpful, but not specific enough (except that part about 1.25G per pound!). In general, it is easier to add your strike water first, which is about 15-18F warmer than you want for mashing. First, by adding the strike water to your mashing cooler, you let it warm up the tun while cooling off the water. Once the tun is hot and the water has cooled a few degrees, usually about 10-12F above your target mash temp assuming you have room-temperature grains, you can go ahead and dough-in (pour in grain and stir).

I would go for 152 or 153F because it is a good middle ground for body/dryness, and it allows for some wiggle room.

What I do is heat up water in my hot liquor tun (just a fancy term for a hot water heater- a boil kettle can do this too) to about 175F or so. I pour my strike water into my mash-tun cooler and be careful to measure it along the way to make sure I have the volume I want (usually 1.25Q/pound). After a couple minutes, I take the lid off and get a temperature reading. For a ~10lb grainbill, I'll probably wait until it hits about 165F. If it is still too warm, I'll stir and leave the lid open- it is easier to cool off than to heat back up once it is in the cooler. Once I'm at 165F, I'll pour in my room temperature grains and stir in carefully to break up any clumps. I'll close the door for a couple more minutes, then open up and take another temperature reading. Hopefully, I'll be seeing right around 152F or so.

I'll stir it a couple times during the 60 minute period, and then slowly vorlauf: pour wort from the cooler spigot into a container and carefully pour it all back on top of the mash in order to recirculate the cloudy wort until it becomes clear. Once it is clear, slowly collect these first runnings into your boil kettle.

Sparging is easy. I will measure the amount of wort I collected on the first pass, and subtract that from my target boil volume. The difference is how much you will want to sparge with since no more water will be absorbed or lost to deadspace in the tun. Add your prescribed sparge water in one, two or more passes if you want to split it up. Stir in, vorlauf again until clear, and repeat. Knowing how much water will be absorbed by the grain or will be lost to deadspace in the tun can help, but it isn't totally necessary if you find out how much wort you collect on your first pass.

You can calculate your efficiency by measuring how much water you put into the mash tun, how much you have in your boil kettle (pre-boil), and measuring the gravity of the wort (pre-boil). When measuring this gravity, let the wort cool to room temp before trying to put it on the hydrometer...hot wort wont make a hydrometer give an accurate reading.

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