Warning, post is a little long 
A couple weeks ago I tried out Edwort's Haus Pale Ale as my first all-grain. Yesterday I decided to try BierMuncher's centennial blonde (my first 10gal batch).
First lesson, don't leave hoses in the garage in MN. I was smart enough to take them off the faucet, but even in the garage they were frozen solid. I hooked them up to the laundry sink and ran hot water until everything was melted, took about 20 min per hose.
Since I couldn't use the hose to get water, I used hot water from the laundry sink. This was actually a good thing, because the water was coming out around 140 degrees instead of the 40 degree ground water, saved me a lot of propane.
I added a little over 5.5 gal of water to my grains (approx 1.25qts/lb) and hit a mash temp of 150.2 (almost perfect). After an hour it had only dropped to 149.8 degrees (in a 10gal round cooler). Before the hour was up, I heated 10qts of water to 175 degrees and added that to the mash and began to collect my first runnings. I collected about 6 gals. While collecting the first runnings, I heated another 5 gallons to 175 degrees and then added that to the grain, stirred and let sit for 10 min. Then I heated another 3 gallons of water to 175 while I collected the second runnings. Then repeated the process with the 3 gallons and collected a total of just under 14 gallons.
Is this the correct way to batch sparge? Most of the stuff I've read here, it seems like people only batch sparge once, but I don't think I could have fit the 8 gallons of sparge water at once without overflowing the cooler.
The boil went without a problem. It took about 30 min to get the 14 gal to a rolling boil on my SQ14 propane burner. I added the hops according to the schedule, but the fun really began when I tried to start cooling the hot wort.
Last time I used my homemade CFC and it worked flawlessly. This time, not so much. I used hop bags, but the pickup tube on my keggle became clogged. When doing 5 gal batches, I just stick kitchen tongs in the wort and pull out the hop bags, with 11 gal of hot wort, the tongs weren't long enough. As I'm trying to unclog the pickup tube by blowing into the end of the tube connected to the keggle, water is spraying all over the garage floor and almost instantly turning to ice (it was somewhere around 3 degrees outside at this point). The screw driver I was using to tighten the clamps would freeze to the garage floor if I let it sit on the wet floor for more than a minute.
After about 5 min of fussing around, my dad helped me lift the keggle and drop it in a snow bank next to the garage. I was a little worried about getting some nasties in the wort causing an infection, but then I figured that just about as many organisms live in boiling wort as they do in below-freezing temperatures. After about 20 min in the snow, we carried the wort, which was down to about 150 degrees to the basement where we could find out what was wrong with the CFC without our finger tips freezing.
I think the problem with the CFC ended up being one of the hose clamps wasn't very tight, so I was losing the vacuum from the venturi pump. But I'm not positive that was the problem, because I tightened that and also moved the keggle on my work bench so that gravity was also helping.
My last problem was that I only bought one pkg of nottingham yeast, but since this beer has a pretty low OG, I figured that 1 pkg hydrated and split would be ok.
So in the future, I'm going to try not to brew when the temp is below 20 degrees (preferably not below 32). I'm also going to put my burner on cinder blocks so that gravity can help push the wort through the CFC (atleast until I convince SWMBO that I need a march pump).
Overall, I still had a blast making the beer, I'm addicted to brewing! I had an OG of 1.040 which is exactly what beersmith predicted at 70% efficiency which is what I guessed (I'm at the mercy of the LHBS's mill until I get a barley crusher, crossing my fingers for one on christmas morning). This will make a great session beer right around 4% ABV.
But now I need to sit back and drink some beer because all my beer vessels are full! 3 kegs, 2 primaries and 2 secondaries all full!
I forgot to mention that buying everything from my LHBS was only $26, it helps that he hasn't gotten in his new shipment of hops yet, so he's still selling 1 oz of cascade for $1.19 and 1 oz of centennial for $1.49!
A couple weeks ago I tried out Edwort's Haus Pale Ale as my first all-grain. Yesterday I decided to try BierMuncher's centennial blonde (my first 10gal batch).
First lesson, don't leave hoses in the garage in MN. I was smart enough to take them off the faucet, but even in the garage they were frozen solid. I hooked them up to the laundry sink and ran hot water until everything was melted, took about 20 min per hose.
Since I couldn't use the hose to get water, I used hot water from the laundry sink. This was actually a good thing, because the water was coming out around 140 degrees instead of the 40 degree ground water, saved me a lot of propane.
I added a little over 5.5 gal of water to my grains (approx 1.25qts/lb) and hit a mash temp of 150.2 (almost perfect). After an hour it had only dropped to 149.8 degrees (in a 10gal round cooler). Before the hour was up, I heated 10qts of water to 175 degrees and added that to the mash and began to collect my first runnings. I collected about 6 gals. While collecting the first runnings, I heated another 5 gallons to 175 degrees and then added that to the grain, stirred and let sit for 10 min. Then I heated another 3 gallons of water to 175 while I collected the second runnings. Then repeated the process with the 3 gallons and collected a total of just under 14 gallons.
Is this the correct way to batch sparge? Most of the stuff I've read here, it seems like people only batch sparge once, but I don't think I could have fit the 8 gallons of sparge water at once without overflowing the cooler.
The boil went without a problem. It took about 30 min to get the 14 gal to a rolling boil on my SQ14 propane burner. I added the hops according to the schedule, but the fun really began when I tried to start cooling the hot wort.
Last time I used my homemade CFC and it worked flawlessly. This time, not so much. I used hop bags, but the pickup tube on my keggle became clogged. When doing 5 gal batches, I just stick kitchen tongs in the wort and pull out the hop bags, with 11 gal of hot wort, the tongs weren't long enough. As I'm trying to unclog the pickup tube by blowing into the end of the tube connected to the keggle, water is spraying all over the garage floor and almost instantly turning to ice (it was somewhere around 3 degrees outside at this point). The screw driver I was using to tighten the clamps would freeze to the garage floor if I let it sit on the wet floor for more than a minute.
After about 5 min of fussing around, my dad helped me lift the keggle and drop it in a snow bank next to the garage. I was a little worried about getting some nasties in the wort causing an infection, but then I figured that just about as many organisms live in boiling wort as they do in below-freezing temperatures. After about 20 min in the snow, we carried the wort, which was down to about 150 degrees to the basement where we could find out what was wrong with the CFC without our finger tips freezing.
I think the problem with the CFC ended up being one of the hose clamps wasn't very tight, so I was losing the vacuum from the venturi pump. But I'm not positive that was the problem, because I tightened that and also moved the keggle on my work bench so that gravity was also helping.
My last problem was that I only bought one pkg of nottingham yeast, but since this beer has a pretty low OG, I figured that 1 pkg hydrated and split would be ok.
So in the future, I'm going to try not to brew when the temp is below 20 degrees (preferably not below 32). I'm also going to put my burner on cinder blocks so that gravity can help push the wort through the CFC (atleast until I convince SWMBO that I need a march pump).
Overall, I still had a blast making the beer, I'm addicted to brewing! I had an OG of 1.040 which is exactly what beersmith predicted at 70% efficiency which is what I guessed (I'm at the mercy of the LHBS's mill until I get a barley crusher, crossing my fingers for one on christmas morning). This will make a great session beer right around 4% ABV.
But now I need to sit back and drink some beer because all my beer vessels are full! 3 kegs, 2 primaries and 2 secondaries all full!
I forgot to mention that buying everything from my LHBS was only $26, it helps that he hasn't gotten in his new shipment of hops yet, so he's still selling 1 oz of cascade for $1.19 and 1 oz of centennial for $1.49!
