My First Unaccompanied All Grain Brew Day

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AVL_HopHead

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First time without my brew mentor today. Didn't go so hot. I used Jamil's Robust Vanilla Porter recipe. Things went downhill after I found myself unprepared and quickly having to calculate my sparge and strike temps. Clearly should have done that before. Anyways, long story short, I added WAY too much sparge water and collected damn near 10 gallons of wort.

Again quickly looking on forums and what not decided to add some extra light DME. 12ounces as it was all I had. Then decided to boil the hell out of it for 2 hours or so. I boiled off 4 gallons. Yeah... epic.

In hindsight I realized I should haveboiled off and then done hop additions but no. I had a 120 min boil with the hops. Wicked fail. My gravity read 1.076 which was way off the projected 1.068.

Next time I need to write down everything. Not sure what the hell I was thinking. I just was anxious and wanted to jump in
On top of all the Brewing drama my wife gets annoyed [read. Pissed] because what I said would take 5 hours turned into 7.

I learned a lesson in preparedness if nothing else. I need to Google and try to find some sort of checklist and brew day template so I am more prepared next time. I hope my yeast. Is up to the task. At least I made a starter, though there were no "fireworks ". Nice yeast cake though.

Sorry about grammar / spelling - using a tablet to type and its annoying.
 
Buy a copy of beersmith and you can print out a step by step for
your entire brew with all times and volumes calculated for you.
It's worth every penny.
 
mschaefer56 said:
Buy a copy of beersmith and you can print out a step by step for
your entire brew with all times and volumes calculated for you.
It's worth every penny.

That sounds good, I'll take a look at it. Thanks! Is this the sort of thing most folks use or just the absentminded pro like myself? :)
 
That sounds good, I'll take a look at it. Thanks! Is this the sort of thing most folks use or just the absentminded pro like myself? :)

Lots of people use brewing software. I went to a friends house Saturday to learn how to do all grain. He was using iBREW on his iPAD. I was using Brewtarget on my laptop to compare softwares. All of our numbers were extremely close as far as water temps, volumes, gravity readings, etc. With Brewtarget you can also print out a "brew day" checklist that gives a step by step directions. Also, one of the good thing about Brewtarget is that it's a free down load. If I really like it after a couple of brews, I plan on making a donation. If you don't like it, you can always buy Beersmith. Here's the link. What do ya have to lose.

http://brewtarget.sourceforge.net/

Here's the homebrewtalk link that tells you all about it and may answer some of your questions.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f84/brewtarget-1-2-4-free-brewing-software-277810/
 
I have an excel spreadsheet that I use to record the recipie, the calculated OG and FG, and the actual readings on brew day. I'd post it but I have never been succesful posting excel on this forum. I believe it is not a supported file type. I tweak it regularly as I improve my process.
 

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