Recommendations for 1st All Grain

Just got all my equipment together. I'm thinking a Chocolate Milk Stout kit from northern brewer. Suggestions? Opinions? Words of Wisdom?

My personal opinion is to go straight down the middle with a simple pale recipe. Do the same one 2-3x to get your processes and gear down. You will learn tons about hitting gravities, boil losses, grain absorption, grind, etc etc. You could also do a decent Belgian ale for something a bit nicer, but still dead simple recipe.

Also, find a good local homebrew store and get your grain, hops and yeast there.

Make whatever you like to drink and has simple grain bill, ie i would make simple IPA 9# of 2row, 2# crystal 40, 2# of vienna, 1oz of bittering hops (warrior, nugget, galena..) and 3-4 oz of cascade and you are ready to go

yes. echoing the past two posters, keep it as simple as possible. a pale ale or amber. something with a simple grain bill with no adjuncts.

Komodo said:

My personal opinion is to go straight down the middle with a simple pale recipe. Do the same one 2-3x to get your processes and gear down. You will learn tons about hitting gravities, boil losses, grain absorption, grind, etc etc. You could also do a decent Belgian ale for something a bit nicer, but still dead simple recipe.

Also, find a good local homebrew store and get your grain, hops and yeast there.

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I have a LHBS that I use some. I've been getting my extract kits from northern brewer lately. Is there a reason I should use my LHBS over NB? I figure that if I order the same kit a couple of times i would have better control. How is the crush from NB. I know my LHBS uses a coffee grinder. Should I be worried on efficiency?

I've ordered some extract with steeping garin kits from NB. Most were ok on the crush, but one had a whole bunch of whole grains. Hardly looked crushed at all. I ended up using a beer bottle on a cookie sheet to crush them finer. Haven't ordered an all grain kit from them yet.

It might be good to get some iodine so you can test for starch during your mashing process. It might be overkill but that is how I make sure that the conversion is done (it certainly gives me some peace of mind knowing that my mash completely converted).

The test itself is simple, take a small sample of the mash (one drip) on a white plate, add a drop of iodine and look for black spots. If you take one sample right at the beginning you will immediately know what to look for.

Yep. Already got iodine at the house.

Do an all grain version of a previous extract beer that you are familiar with. It will let you identify the benefits of all grain and areas of improvement in your process. One thing to note, is that if you are using a kit from NB you will want to plug it into something like BeerSmith or an equivalent program. It will let you know exactly how much water to use, and what temperature it should be for your equipment. Before you start all grain brewing, do some tests on your equipment to see how much heat your mash tun absorbs (will want to pre-heat it), how long it takes for you to reach a full boil, how much you boil off in your brew kettle, etc. Do a dry run of the process in your head, or set it up and do a mock-brewing session where you say "now I'm doing this". It may sound stupid, but you get the process ingrained and it starts to become muscle memory. My biggest problems when I started all grain brewing, were hitting the right temperatures, so prep-work helps out a lot. Make sure you have plenty of extra water that is prepared the way you like it (filtered or whatever). If BeerSmith tells you that you need 9.2 gallons of water for brewing, have more.

Words of wisdom...... Make sure your valves are shut before adding liquid, don't turn on the heat before adding wort to the brew kettle, clean your equipment in advance so you have less work to do, make sure you have enough propane, make a wind guard if it's windy, keep a siphon and pitcher on hand, know where your essential tools are before starting, don't use a glass thermometer, prep your yeast at least a day in advance, keep an eye on your burner, prep for boil-overs (depending), keep a towel handy, don't clean out the mash tun while it's hot, don't leave the mash tun full to "clean up tomorrow", clean everything as soon as you're done, check the local weather before brewing, have some DME/LME on hand (if you want to increase gravity a bit), and above all...have fun!

+1 to making sure the valve on your mash tun is closed before adding your strike water. Been there and done that...

My first all-grain, in fact my first ever beer I brewed was the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone from Northern Brewer. I was thrilled with the result - I think it is the best tasting beer I've made. It wasn't my clearest beer - I didn't cool the wort fast enough and I pushed it into an IPA, and I think that was an improvement.

You asked about their kits - I've only ordered that one from NB and have purchased the rest from my LHBS, but I'm considering ordering from NB again. The grain from my LHBS just doesn't taste as fresh as the bag I'd received from NB.

Steve

+1 on everything Teromous said.
For the first brew or two you will be finding how fast you heat, how you hold or lose temps, volumes and losses due to equipment, boil off, etc. The all-grain trick is using the right water volumes for adding/sparging, boiling and hitting your gravity and final volume depending on what process you use (ie. Sparge, no sparge, batch sparge, BIAB).