First AG tomorrow, looking for advice

Doing my first AG tomorrow, it will be a saison based on Stone's Vertical Epic, a saison with kaffir lime leaves. Recipe below. I will be mashing in a 7 gallon brew pot on a propane burner, I will just micro-manage heat to maintain temperatures and stir with a big spoon. I have a bucket with a spigot and a sparging bag. Plan to bring mash up to 170 at the end, pour in the bucket, drain and recirculate until clear and continue sparking with 170*F water. My friend at work who brews has a much more complicated mashing schedule with many temperature changes...will what is below work ok? I will probably use a wyeast belgian yeast, I have had better luck with the smack packs than with White Labs.
Thanks


Saison

For 5 gallons
OG 1.076 - 1.081
FG 1.011
ABV: 8.5%
IBU: 35
Mash efficiency: 70%

14# Belgian Pale Malt
1# flaked white wheat

1.5 oz Hallertau "Tradition" or Sterling Hops, 60 min. 6%AA
4 - 7 Kaffir Lime leaves (available at Asian Grocery Stores)

WLP550 Whitelabs yeast, pitched up to 1 pint of slurry.

Mash in all grains to rest at 148F to 150F with 20 quarts water. Hold for 1 hour, or complete conversion is achieved. Recirculate until clear wort is achieved.

Sparge to collect 6.5 gallons. Ending volume is to be 5.5 gallons, so adjust the volume to account for loss during a 90 minute boil.

Boil for 90 minutes, adding all hops for 60. Use Irish moss for the last 15 minutes.

Using a wort chiller, bring temperature down to 70F in 30 minutes or less. Leave as much hot break behind in kettle as possible. If this is not possible, allow trub to settle and transfer off of trub before pitching yeast.

Pitch yeast and oxygenate the wort very well.

Primary Ferment for 12 days at 60F to 70F.

Just before transfer:

Boil 1 Quart of water for 5 minutes, add the kifir leaves to the hot water. Allow to steep for 20 minutes. Separate the leaves from the water and add the infused water to the secondary (it should be pretty cool by now).

Immediately transfer the beer into the secondary, allow to cool age at 40F to 50F for three to four weeks.

Prime, keg or bottle per your usual methods.

Have fun with your first AG. Plan to set aside about 8 hours though.

I think that 40-50 degrees for three weeks in the secondary may be a bit long for an ale. If you can get that temp for that long and consistent...go for it. I'd be a bit too impatient.

Sparging with a grain bag and bucket will be a PITA but will work. I thing your efficiency may suffer using the bag like that. I would be surprised to see you hit higher than 60-65% with that method.

With a beer that big, your starter is way too small. You will have an extremely long lag time before you see active fermentation and you won't get the attenuation you want. You should step that up to a minimum of 2 quarts at least 24 hours ahead of time. A pint of starter is not enough to promote a significant amount of yeast growth. That amount is not signifcantly better than letting your smack pack swell and pitching with no starter.

Sorry to sound negative, I just don't want to read another "My final gravity is too high, should I pitch more yeast" thread. Also let the beer sit in primary for 3 weeks or so before racking to secondary. The secondary, in homebrewing, is not an actual secondary fermentation. Secondary fermentation involves the pitching of more fermentables at a later stage, rather than just racking. What we do for secondary is refered to in commercial breweries as racking to a "bright tank". This is the stage where you get the beer off the yeast and let it clear or turn "bright". Some additional conditioning by the yeast still takes place, but fermentation is done for all practical purposes.

Wayne
Bugeater Brewing Company

OG is 1.075, total brew time was 5 1/2 hours, not bad for my first AG. Not really sure how to calculate efficiency, I'll try to figure it out. Pretty much everything went as planned, the sparge bag was a bit of a pain, but we forced it to work, it got stuck a lot and we had to stir and pull on the bag, runoff was a little cloudy, and there is a ton of trub right now....ended up tearing the bag when I pulled it out to dump the spent grains...oh well, $7.00 down the drain, maybe I'll build a MLT for the next AG batch. We'll see when fermentation takes off, pitched at 5:15pm.

Well, pitched at 5:15pm, by 10pm when I last looked, it was bubbling once every 20 seconds or so, this morning it was in full ferment mode, had already blown most of the liquid out of the airlock....so much for not having a big enough starter to get a short lag...

I ran your grains through ProMash and I'm getting an efficiency of about 68 percent. Not bad for your first attempt.
I would recommend getting a false bottom or fashioning a manifold. I bet your efficiency would increase and the mash would be less of a hassle.
Great job!

Good session. I'll second RB's manifold comment.

15*37=555

555/5=111

75/111=68%
Quicker than running promash.

Bugeaterbrewing said:

Also let the beer sit in primary for 3 weeks or so before racking to secondary.
Wayne
Bugeater Brewing Company

Click to expand...

3 weeks in the primary is a mighty long time.

All the books I've read and most of the people offering advise here say rack when the fermentation actions slows down (usually between 2-6 days for ale 4-10 for lager according to John Palmer). Leaving the beer sitting on the dead yeast and trub can cause off flavors. Just my $0.02.

ColoradoXJ13 said:

runoff was a little cloudy, and there is a ton of trub right now....maybe I'll build a MLT for the next AG batch.

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Don't worry about too much trub your first time out. Take a look at my 1st AG batch (link below). I had a ton 1/2 of trub. This was a Kolsch and when it was all said and done, this turned out to be the clearest brew I've done so far. I did move from secondary to a keg and chilled for 5 days before bottling.

My next AG batch, I wrapped a large paint strainer cloth (Lowes $2.00) around my immersion chiller (after the wort had cooled), dunked it into the brew pot gently and and dipped my racking cane inside the clear pool of wort to rack to the primary. Made a huge difference.

Definitely want to go to a manifold. Easier than you think. There's a pic or two of my setup linked below.

RichBrewer said:

I ran your grains through ProMash and I'm getting an efficiency of about 68 percent. Not bad for your first attempt.
I would recommend getting a false bottom or fashioning a manifold. I bet your efficiency would increase and the mash would be less of a hassle.
Great job!

Click to expand...

Do you mean to use a false bottom or manifold in addition to a grain bag or instead of it? I could probably put a manifold in line with the spigot and just do that instead of the bag. I really liked the batch sparging in a bucket with a bag, it worked really easy except that it kept clogging. I am of the opinion that the less equipment I need, the better (and cheaper!)

I found that doing the mash in a pot wasn't all that hard, with a longer stir paddle it would be totally easy, I am a big fan of keeping things simple. I just kept checking the temp in the pot (big 7 gallon pot on a king propane burner) every 15min or so and adding heat as needed. Seems easier than using a cooler and having to calculate what temps to add water at, also was able to use a lot less mash water b/c I didn't have to add water to bring it to 170*F for mash out.

That paint-strainer-cloth-around-the-chiller idea is a good one. Hmmm.... I'm always open to better filtration from kettle to primary. I've been using copper Chore Boy scrubbers on the tip of my racking cane, but they are a pain to clean afterwards. Still reasonably effective, though.

Thanks for posting the tip, KE.

ColoradoXJ13 said:

Do you mean to use a manifold in addition to a grain bag or instead of it?

Seems easier than using a cooler and having to calculate what temps to add water at, also was able to use a lot less mash water b/c I didn't have to add water to bring it to 170*F for mash out.

Click to expand...

Yeah, no need to use a bag if you're straining through a manifold. My cooler was a 5 gallon from Sam's $18.00. The plumbing was about another $10 or so. Easy to make...you can see pictures using the link in my signature below.

The other advantage to using a mash tun is you can recirculate your wort when you begin to runoff and that will clear a lot of the particles out. The crushed grains act as a great filter and if you recirculate the first 5-6 quarts, you'll find you already have a lot clearer boil.

Yep. a cooler mash tun and manifold is real easy to use for batch sparging. No effort at all.

I think most people will tell you that using a cooler with some kind of manifold/braid is the epitomy of KISS.
- bring strike water to temp
- add grains and stir
- let sit for 30-60 mins
- batch sparge (easy)