I must say, the jump from extract brewing to all grain is full of surprises. I have brewed three all grain beers, and each one of them has had unique challenges and woes. The last one, however, has brought up a situation which I wouldn't mind getting some advice on.
I was brewing my first big beer, (12.5%), and it took almost 12 hours from start to finish. The biggest time drain was boiling tons and tons of excess sparge water away. So after the mash I lautered until the corrected gravity reading of the runnings was about 1.012. It took a lot of water to get to this point. In order to get it down to a 5 gallon batch, I boiled water away in 4 different pots for hours until the volume came down, then recombined everything in the turkey fryer. The way I sparged was just adding water as needed to keep about an inch or two of liquid above the grain bed.
Is it normal that I had to use so much water to extract all the sugar from the mash?
Is there any more efficient way of doing this, so I don't have to add hours of boil time in order to reduce my batch size to 5 gallons?
I've somewhere heard that excess boiling "caramelizes" the grain. If I had to boil for such an extensive amount of time, have I pretty much lost any contribution of the lighter specialty grains.. such as a Belgian Pils grain?
As a side note, I used 23 pounds of grain and guessed a 70% mash efficiency. I was pretty much right on! My corrected OG was 1.112! Woo!
I was brewing my first big beer, (12.5%), and it took almost 12 hours from start to finish. The biggest time drain was boiling tons and tons of excess sparge water away. So after the mash I lautered until the corrected gravity reading of the runnings was about 1.012. It took a lot of water to get to this point. In order to get it down to a 5 gallon batch, I boiled water away in 4 different pots for hours until the volume came down, then recombined everything in the turkey fryer. The way I sparged was just adding water as needed to keep about an inch or two of liquid above the grain bed.
Is it normal that I had to use so much water to extract all the sugar from the mash?
Is there any more efficient way of doing this, so I don't have to add hours of boil time in order to reduce my batch size to 5 gallons?
I've somewhere heard that excess boiling "caramelizes" the grain. If I had to boil for such an extensive amount of time, have I pretty much lost any contribution of the lighter specialty grains.. such as a Belgian Pils grain?
As a side note, I used 23 pounds of grain and guessed a 70% mash efficiency. I was pretty much right on! My corrected OG was 1.112! Woo!
