ready to get into all grain brewing

in the past 2 1/2 years i have over 2 dozen partial mash beers under belt and i'm looking to increase my brewing frequency to at least 5gallons per week. looking at my costs, most of my brews turn out cheaper per ounce than unsatisfying american 6 packs. to further cut costs, i substitute domestic grains when possible and i've been washing liquid yeast with great results (and savings.) liquid malt extract is holding me back from extremely affordable high quality beer.

how possible would it be to easily move to all grain with my current set up?
1. gas kitchen stove.
2. cheap 7-8gallon aluminum kettle. takes forever to bring 6-7 gallons of water to a boil, even with the pot sitting on 2 burners. thats why they call it a "brew day", right? never tried wrapping it with insulation.
3. copper coil immersion chiller
4. expandable sink strainer. similar to one of these

i know my kettle is large enough to use as a monitored brew-pot-mash-tun. looks like my problem is lautering. i currently steep 3-5lbs of grains in a nylon bag, but it seems like having multiple grain bags or 1 large bag would be troublesome for sparging/lautering. anyone have experience with this?

so far, i've been leaning toward using my kettle to step-mash and making a Zapap lauter tun out of a couple food-grade buckets.




do you guys think this system would work out? i don't want to have a huge chest cooler MLT taking up space if i can mash in the same pot.

the only method i can see without having to buy/fab anything would be to split my grain bill into 2 or 3 bags, mash in the kettle, and sparge by putting one bag at a time into the strainer sitting on a bucket. is that just pointless, or could it actually work well?

Have you been doing full boils with partial mash? Turkey fryers are cheap to come by on Craigslist. Once I had that I did a zapap LT and I was set.

I have a friend who is a professional brewer who started out mashing in a kettle on a stovetop.

The only problem I can see is how will you stir your mash with all those bags? To evenly distribute the heat in the mash will take a LOT of stirring. You could do the mash without the bags and lots and lots of elbow grease, then when mash is complete line a fermenting bucket with a large grain bag and pour the mash in. Then tie the bag up to a strong hook and let it drain. It might take two batches, or maybe reduce your batch size a little. Then siphon the wort back into the kettle. Not perfect, but it seems to fit your constraints.

I'm concerned about it taking forever to come to a boil -- once it starts boiling does it boil strong enough? Because if you can't get a rolling boil maybe you could put some of the wort another large stockpot, split the hops roughly proportionally, and boil in two batches?

chirs said:

Have you been doing full boils with partial mash? Turkey fryers are cheap to come by on Craigslist. Once I had that I did a zapap LT and I was set.

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ya, i've been doing full boils with 3-5lb of grain in a bag then adding LME. started off using partial boils, but it seems like full boils are more consistent, have better hop utilization, and light colored ales come out lighter than those i did with partial boils.

so the zapap LT works fine for you?

HotbreakHotel said:

I have a friend who is a professional brewer who started out mashing in a kettle on a stovetop.

The only problem I can see is how will you stir your mash with all those bags? To evenly distribute the heat in the mash will take a LOT of stirring. You could do the mash without the bags and lots and lots of elbow grease, then when mash is complete line a fermenting bucket with a large grain bag and pour the mash in. Then tie the bag up to a strong hook and let it drain. It might take two batches, or maybe reduce your batch size a little. Then siphon the wort back into the kettle. Not perfect, but it seems to fit your constraints.

I'm concerned about it taking forever to come to a boil -- once it starts boiling does it boil strong enough? Because if you can't get a rolling boil maybe you could put some of the wort another large stockpot, split the hops roughly proportionally, and boil in two batches?

Click to expand...

its easy for me to sparge my grain bag, but i agree, a full mash in grain bags sounds dumb. do you know what type of lautering worked for your friend's kitchen set up?

i'm able to get a rolling boil but thats about it once the lid is off. nothing violent.

The Zapap worked great. I know use a rubbermaid cooler conversion...mostly bc I'm addicted to making more gear

do you know what type of lautering worked for your friend's kitchen set up?

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I'm sorry, no I don't.

a full mash in grain bags sounds dumb

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You laugh, but my last batch of hefeweizen was just that -- I forgot the rice hulls and my sparge kept getting stuck, so I drained the whole 5 gallon batch from a bag! It worked, and I'm actually drinking one right now!

HotbreakHotel said:

You laugh, but my last batch of hefeweizen was just that -- I forgot the rice hulls and my sparge kept getting stuck, so I drained the whole 5 gallon batch from a bag! It worked, and I'm actually drinking one right now!

Click to expand...

good to see the big bag worked. do you normally have to add rice hulls to your MTL, or is that because of all the wheat in the hefe?

thanks for the input, guys!

After a year and a half of brewing extract batches w/ specialty grains, I made the move to AG in June. Since then, I've done 7 batches. Before, my setup sounds a lot like you describe.
I was doing full 5-gallon boils on our propane cooktop. It was taking a long time to bring that much liquid to a boil. I shortened it somewhat by breaking the water down into a larger amount in the big pot, and two smaller amounts in smaller pots, one to steep the grains, and the other to "sparge" those grains. That at least got those fractions to 155F, so that the bigger pot didn't have as far to go when the liquid was dumped in.
However, it was still taking too long to boil (my highest output burner on our cooktop is only about 8500 BTU). I shortened the time significantly by insulating the pot with some automotive firewall insulation I got from J.C. Whitney. They also sell the adhesive to stick it to the pot, and the heatproof foil tape to wrap it.
This made my extract brew day fall to about 3 hours or a bit more. Then came the decision to switch to AG. After a lot of reading, I decided that brewing indoors on the cooktop was just too inefficient for AG brewing, so I got a propane burner and I now brew in the garage. Things have gone great since June.....I'll find out how well they go in cold weather this Winter.
I decided the best brewing system for me to use in AG was single infusion / batch sparge / cooler conversion MLT with braid manifold. As far as I'm concerned, this has worked very well. Apart from what has been mentioned, the two indispensable accessories I got were a refractometer to check SGs (way more efficient on the hot side than a hydrometer) and a good thermometer (I chose the Thermapen). Your copper wort chiller (what I use) will continue to work well.