I decided to give BIAB another visit and I am pleased to report it seems to have worked out really well. The sad news is I didn't take photos for the entire process.
Big shout out for Wilser Brewer at biab bags for the nice custom bag. I mash in a square 48 quart Igloo cooler and he designed a nice bag that fits around the top hinge pefectly. Normally (for years) I use this cooler with a bazooka or SS mesh strainer and do batch sparges. On a whim I decided to try the bag.
I'm making a (new to me) SMASH recipe for a pale ale that uses 2 row and Simcoe. I picked the BIAB profile from BeerSmith. Instead of doing a full volume I cut the estimate in half and mashed with half the water. The profile called for 149. I was worried so I took a reading at 45 minutes and it was a good thing because at 60 minutes I saw the gravity increase. It appears my cooler isn't holding temp so well. So I added another 15 and took a reading where I saw a small bump. I gave it another 15 where it seem to finally stop.
I debated vorlauf and then decided to just drain. I then squeezed the bag and tipped the cooler over the BK to get everything out. The BK then went on the burner. The remaining "sparge" went into the MT and I mixed it as best I could. I let it sit for 10 minutes. Then I started the same quick drain process. But this time I kept an eye on the volume in the BK to make sure I wasn't over sparging. I did squeeze a bit again but not too much. BeerSmith was close as I didn't leave much in the MT. Cranked the burner up and started the boil and the rest was a regular brew day. Here are my observations:
Overall I'm very pleased. I still had a few issues where I think I could improve the process but the cleaning of the MT alone was impressive. I normally spend a ton of time cleaning grains from the cooler and to have them all in a nice solid mass that transfers right into a garbage bag was a big relief. I'm trying to nail down some of the numbers in BeerSmith but I think this also resulted in a big improvement in efficiency for me.
Big shout out for Wilser Brewer at biab bags for the nice custom bag. I mash in a square 48 quart Igloo cooler and he designed a nice bag that fits around the top hinge pefectly. Normally (for years) I use this cooler with a bazooka or SS mesh strainer and do batch sparges. On a whim I decided to try the bag.
I'm making a (new to me) SMASH recipe for a pale ale that uses 2 row and Simcoe. I picked the BIAB profile from BeerSmith. Instead of doing a full volume I cut the estimate in half and mashed with half the water. The profile called for 149. I was worried so I took a reading at 45 minutes and it was a good thing because at 60 minutes I saw the gravity increase. It appears my cooler isn't holding temp so well. So I added another 15 and took a reading where I saw a small bump. I gave it another 15 where it seem to finally stop.
I debated vorlauf and then decided to just drain. I then squeezed the bag and tipped the cooler over the BK to get everything out. The BK then went on the burner. The remaining "sparge" went into the MT and I mixed it as best I could. I let it sit for 10 minutes. Then I started the same quick drain process. But this time I kept an eye on the volume in the BK to make sure I wasn't over sparging. I did squeeze a bit again but not too much. BeerSmith was close as I didn't leave much in the MT. Cranked the burner up and started the boil and the rest was a regular brew day. Here are my observations:
- Hard to tell if I saved time since the mash was so long
- The wort was much more cloudy than usual
- Squeezing the bag wasn't as hard as I expected but my recipe only had about 8 lbs of grain this time
- My cooler (MT) was so very clean - no cleanup
- Grains in the bag were all clumped together in a nice neat group
- Very easy to clean the spent grains - just let the bag cool and drain and then dump into garbage bag - hardly any grains stuck on bag
- BeerSmith said 85% efficiency at start of boil? My best is usually 72. After boil it was 81%. Wow. I might need to check those numbers again.
Overall I'm very pleased. I still had a few issues where I think I could improve the process but the cleaning of the MT alone was impressive. I normally spend a ton of time cleaning grains from the cooler and to have them all in a nice solid mass that transfers right into a garbage bag was a big relief. I'm trying to nail down some of the numbers in BeerSmith but I think this also resulted in a big improvement in efficiency for me.
In general, I find dry yeast to show activity pretty fast because of the high cell count.
