UnrulyGentleman
Active Member
Hey all, I've been a BIAB brewer for a while now and after many many batches of always coming well under the OG, I finally upgraded to a 3 vessel setup with two converted coolers (the Northern Brewer Deluxe AG kit) to pair with my 10-gallon Blichman kettle. Did my first brew yesterday and was real happy with the whole process, but was hoping to have some critique of my process to see how I can continue to refine my nascent brewing skills.
Did an Irish Red brew with a 8.75lb grain bill and two .75 oz hop additions. Calculated my required strike water volume at 2.84 gallons at 175*. Doughed in with little problem at got it to just about 154* mash temp. Left it untouched for an hour and it maintained that temp pretty well losing maybe only 2* total over the hour. Then I recirculated like crazy using some small containers for about a solid 15 minutes. Luckily I had friends to make it assembly line style and never stopped the flow until we were done. Here's where I kinda winged it - I didn't do a proper mashout, instead opting to go straight to fly sparging and not draining the first runnings out at all. Immediately filled the HLT with 6 gallons of 180* water and held the sparge diffuser over the grain bed, which still had about an inch of water or so on top. Opened up both valves to a trickle and proceeded to just manually hold the diffuser just below the surface level of the water in the MLT until the HLT was empty, which just so happened to perfectly coincide with collecting a total of 6.25 gallons of wort in the kettle. My concern here was the temp of the sparge water coming into the MLT as the temp of that 1-2 inches of water was measuring only about 157* or so. However, I took a sample at this time at had a specific gravity of 1.039 (after adjusting for temp) which according to an efficiency calculator had me at 80%! Pretty darn good I thought. Then went on to boil and the final product was a 1.046 OG, which was slightly above the recipe's called for 1.044!
So, it looks like the final product (currently fermenting) was a success, but since I'm so new I thought I'd ask for some feedback to see what I could do better. I already want a proper sparge arm so I'm not holding it like an idiot for an hour and a better tiered stand setup so that everything flows more effectively. Other than that, any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. The whole thing was honestly way easier than I though and put my BIAB process to shame in terms of efficiency and overall stress during the brew.
Did an Irish Red brew with a 8.75lb grain bill and two .75 oz hop additions. Calculated my required strike water volume at 2.84 gallons at 175*. Doughed in with little problem at got it to just about 154* mash temp. Left it untouched for an hour and it maintained that temp pretty well losing maybe only 2* total over the hour. Then I recirculated like crazy using some small containers for about a solid 15 minutes. Luckily I had friends to make it assembly line style and never stopped the flow until we were done. Here's where I kinda winged it - I didn't do a proper mashout, instead opting to go straight to fly sparging and not draining the first runnings out at all. Immediately filled the HLT with 6 gallons of 180* water and held the sparge diffuser over the grain bed, which still had about an inch of water or so on top. Opened up both valves to a trickle and proceeded to just manually hold the diffuser just below the surface level of the water in the MLT until the HLT was empty, which just so happened to perfectly coincide with collecting a total of 6.25 gallons of wort in the kettle. My concern here was the temp of the sparge water coming into the MLT as the temp of that 1-2 inches of water was measuring only about 157* or so. However, I took a sample at this time at had a specific gravity of 1.039 (after adjusting for temp) which according to an efficiency calculator had me at 80%! Pretty darn good I thought. Then went on to boil and the final product was a 1.046 OG, which was slightly above the recipe's called for 1.044!
So, it looks like the final product (currently fermenting) was a success, but since I'm so new I thought I'd ask for some feedback to see what I could do better. I already want a proper sparge arm so I'm not holding it like an idiot for an hour and a better tiered stand setup so that everything flows more effectively. Other than that, any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. The whole thing was honestly way easier than I though and put my BIAB process to shame in terms of efficiency and overall stress during the brew.
