My first full boil

In preperation for going all grain I had my first 5 gal full boil tonight. This was the first time using my keggle and a few other things. First thing I learned was I need a piece of wire to loop through the hole in the handle of my SS spoon and hook it to the rim. On my old pot the handle would stick above the rim so it was easy to grab and didn't get hot, but with my keggle it would fall down inside the rim and was pretty hot when I would grab it to stir.

The second thing I discovered was I need to come up with a better way to transfer wort from the keggle. In the past I've poured my turkey fryer pot through a screen into a funnel into my carboy, lately I've been using my auto-siphon with a paint strainer around the end and siphoning into my carboy. Today I siphoned into my carboy using the same method but also had an aquarium pump setup aerating the wort as it filled the carboy. Which appeared to work really good, I had a large frothy head by the time everything was in the carboy, though it took longer than previous batches. I suspect the time difference was just due to the volume, previous batches I would rack 2.5-3.5 gal and then top off. This time I racked just under 5 gal.

I pitched my starter which put the level just above 5 gal. So I learned a little bit about my evaporation rate. With a 55k BTU turkey fryer and a keggle I started with 6.25 gal and ended with about 4.9 gal. On my next batch I'll increase my starting volume a bit to try to end up where I want.

It did take about 30 minutes to go from about 145deg to boil so I'm thinking about getting a more efficient burner and using my existing burner in an eventual 3 tier setup for the HLT.

This was a very good exercise and it gave me a good idea about my evaporation rate with my existing burner. In the next week or two I'm going to try my first AG batch, I'll report back how everything goes

Another method instead of syphoning from your keggle to your fermenter, use an aquarium water pump. Just let it soak in sanitizer during the brew, and then pump the sanitzer out of it to sanitize the hose. Its much much faster. But then again, its another piece of equipment to buy.

I like the pump idea. I might have to look into this. The sanitization aspect should be easy, but how easy is it to clean them? Are they easily disassembled to clean every piece? or maybe just running some oxy clean and then some rinse water through them would do the job.

My other thought and probably what I will end up with eventually is drilling the keggle and putting the valve on it. Though I would need to raise the burner up higher on some cement blocks. I'm torn on the idea now because of my lack of experience with all the different filtering methods (false bottom vs bazooka screen vs whatever else). I use a combination of whole hops and pellet hops and everything I've read seems to suggest that a lot of the methods don't deal with the pellet hops very well.