Brew Day BIAB SMASH - Thread for beginners

[Tribe Fan]

Brew day today and I have some time to document the process, so what the heck.

The setup:
Simple 32 qt turketfryer with basket, propane burner, homemade immersion chiller, cleanser, Starsan, bucket and thermometer / timer.

The recipe:
I have 10# of West Branch Ohio grown and malted 2 row, so we are going to make a local single malt and single hop pale ale. 4 oz of 9.5 % AA centennials will be used in this, 1/2 in the boil, half at flameout.

Water is important. The German's use theirs, the English use theirs, I like to use mine. Unfortunately it is extremely hard, so I have an RO system for drinking water with a 20 gal tank for storage. If I didn't have RO water, I would use distilled water. Need about 7 gallons for this recipe. I marked the inside of my bottling bucket with a sharpie so I can see the graduated marking on the outside and use this to measure.

I designed this recipe with 10# of barley being the gating factor. Based on the SG / IBU balance I want, Beersmith tells me a 4 gallon batch is optimal. If you are a beginner, an all grain kit from the LHBS is the way to go. I have two 2 oz packs of centennials I want to use, and once they are open I want to use them all, so I adjust the quantities and timing of the additions to get to the IBU's I want, with the smallest additions going first and building upon that.

A word of warning, now is a good time to open your hops and smell them. If they smell like grapefruit and citrus, heaven. If they smell cheesy, take them back and get new ones.

Yeast will be some WLP001 American Ale yeast I resurrected from 2 years of storage in my fridge. You can easily use WLP from the tube, a smack pack or dry yeast and pitch this directly in the fermentor.

Finally, we'll throw a whirlflok tablet in with 15 minutes left in the boil to help this beer clear.

10# - 2 row Pale Ale malt
.5 oz - Centennial at 60 minutes
.5 oz - Centennial at 30 minutes
1 oz - Centennial at 15 minutes
2 oz Centennials at flame out
1 - whirlflok tablet at 15 minutes

4 gallon yield with targets of 1.058 SG and 47.1 IBU , 5.8% ABV.

The Mash:
I want a medium bodied pale ale mashed in at 152F. I want as much strike water as possible, so I have Beersmith setup with my pot size and reserving .2 gallons as a post mash addition, gets me to 24 quarts of strike water at 162F. My last three batches have all overshot their mash in temps by 3 degrees, and I'd rather be under on this one that over, so we will shoot for a 159F mash in temp to get to 152F and let it mash for 75 minutes.

And after about 5 minutes of stirring we hit 152 and cover it up.

I stir from the middle to the edge of the pot and lift my paddle up the edges to the brim\and make my way 360 degrees around the pot. Doughballs come up the side pretty easily and a few times around the cycle you'll see them completely disappear. I put the thermometer probe through a binder clip attached to the basket handle. A big plus for using the basket is clipping to the handle to get a good angle to the wort.

A word about the grain. I have a barley mill and it's been set to the same setting for years. It's pretty middle of the road and cracks all of the husks. I could go finer, but it works, and my 18V drill needs a newly charged battery to power through it now, so I haven't messed with adjusting it. Plus I still have a 10 gallon cooler setup and don't want to have to adjust it back.

I've also had grain crushed at the my LHBS and they do a nice job as well. I love having the barley crusher, but it is not a mandatory piece.

And it's now after noon, so that means:

After 45 minutes our mash temp has dropped to 143, so I fire up the pot for 5 minutes and stirring pretty constantly get it up to 148.

TBC.......

 

[Tribe Fan]

Since I don't have any carapils in this batch, I will crank up the mash to 161 and hold it for about 10 minutes. This should help with mouthfeel and head retention. At least it is better than doing nothing.

After 11 minutes we're still at 160F, so I'm just going to let it sit until it hits 159. A 20 minute rest here is ideal, and that is exactly what I got.

I use my indoor stove top pot to catch my crushed grains in. One advantage of this is I catch all of the starches that filter through the bag and add them into the mash. The other is, I now have a pot to batch sparge and squeeze the grains.

After doing pretty much nothing for the last couple of hours, we are going to do a whole bunch of things here at once.
1. Measure out our first hop addition.

2. Pull the grains and let the drain over the pot
3. Move the grains over to the other pot and squeeze.

Squeeze tool-

4. Gather some wort and take a reading
5. Fire up the pot and get the boil going.

1.038 at 135F means we are at 1.053 which is right where we should be, with a mash efficiency of 73.6%, which is the same as my last batch. It may be a bit low, but it's consistent, which is more important to me.

Since we are in good shape OG wise, we really don't need to sparge, but I will anyway. I add 1/2 gallon of cold water over the bag, let it drain for 10 minutes and squeeze out excess. Since we set up brewsmith to do a .2 pre-boil addition, I'll add a quart of this back into the kettle and pitch the rest. You could save this for a starter wort also.

I know the wort is going to boil at around 208-210 F, so I'm taking reading and when I get to 198, I am on the watch for hot break and boil overs. I have my propane tank in a spot where I can turn it off quickly, yet get out of the way of any potential boil overs.
Here it is just before it boils:

I'm also keep the surface tension of the foam broken at all times. On this batch, I get a good hot break and as soon as the foam rises I cut back the heat and it falls into the kettle. A minute later I have a good rolling boil.

I use my small batch BIAB bag for hops.

I want as much surface area covered in the pot and with a twist tie that comes on the grain bags, I secure it and throw it in the boil and hit the 60 minute timer.

At 30 minutes, I'll fish out the bag, untie it and add another .5 oz of cents.
Nothing like the smell of whole leaf hops. Yum.

Now is a good time to mix up a gallon of starsan.

After 45 minutes, we are going to fish the bag out again and this time add 1 oz of cents and our whirlflok tablet. Before we put the bag back in the pot, we are going to add the immersion chiller to sterilize it. It is important to take great care with this step.

First, keeping the plastic hoses far away from the burner and second not to be scalded if any water remnants shoot out.

At flame out, 60 minutes, we had out last hop addition, swirl it around the kettle well and turn the water on the immersion chiller. I have the outfeed hose watering the garden.

While we are waiting for the wort to cool, I am sanitizing the bottle bucket, temp probe and carboy fermentor. I also fill up the spray bottle. I want the wort to get to 75F, however long that takes, usually about 15 minutes. I'm also going to sterilize a soup strainer and some tongs to fish out the hop bag.

After pouring into the kettle into the bucket (the only 2 man step) we get a yield into the fermentor of 4 gallons at 1.063, so I've overshot the OG by undershooting the volume. Everything goes in through the strainer.

Shoulda added more sparge water, but on this particular batch with all those hops, heavy on the SG is better than light. We also get our first taste of wort and it is dandy.

I swirl around the yeast starter and pour it in the bucket.

I'm not a big fan of using glass carboys for beer. In this case, it's all I have that is empty. So I'm going to fill it in the same place it will ferment and when it's done, I will siphon back to this same bottling bucket to bottle so I will only have to lift it once, straight up about two feet.

You could use a plastic carboy, or just keep it in the bucket, with a lid and airlock and let it ferment in there. If I did this, I would clean and sanitize my paddle and stir air into the wort before I airlocked it.

I set the spigot up so that the wort runs down the side of the carboy and aerates.

Last step is to plug it with a sanitized airlock and stopper.

Within the next 24 hours, this will be bubbling hard and in about two weeks in will be beer. I'll check back in on it then.

Looking back on this one, I don't normally use this amount of hops, and have not added 2 oz at flame out. I think that absorbed more wort than I have built in the calculations. Next time around I would sparge with a full gallon and add 2-3 quarts of it to the boil.

Cheers!

 

[Dexlor]

Nice guide to help understand the basic process.

One thing I notices was that the sections for the Strike Water, Mash, and the image of the grain itself seem to be a bit out of order.

Otherwise, great guide. I always forget to take all the right pictures to tell a full story on brew day.