Edh? I would like to hear about your experiences with going to all grain. I'm half scared to as I like high abv in my brews. The weakest batch being 8%. Was it all it's cracked up to be?
El Dorado Hills, CA.
While I used to live in CA and had plenty of friends from the Delta area, I moved. *sniff* Welcome to the forums anyway!
All grain isn't that scary, grains should be cheaper than malt extract, and have more varieties. It's just a pain if you don't have a proper setup and have to fake a filter. I searched on YouTube for a video I saw a long time ago but couldn't find it. It was the best of the quick setup's I've seen. A buddy and I tried it out side by side with my cooler mash tun. It worked pretty damn well. In the video a guy showed how to use your bottling bucket, an expandable vegetable steamer, and--if you wanted--a large nylon bag to make a simple mash tun. It worked really well.
An important trick to all gran is to keep the temp in the range of 155°F ± 5°F during the mash and well stirred. Stirring it thoroughly once every 15 minutes is enough to get proper conversion. Batch sparging is the simplest method to finish.
Here's an outline of the process with a batch sparge to get you started:
Mash for an hour with 1.25qt of water near 180-190°F for ever lb of grain. The high temp of the starting liquid is to account for the grain being cooler. It should end up being what your recipe calls for or 155°F. After the hour add about half a gallon of 170+°F water (again, the high temp is only to bring the mash temp back up) and mix to loosen up the grain.
Then take a pitcher and drain off a quart or so and gently pour it back on top of the grain bed. The
first runnings will be cloudy, so
vorlauf-ing puts the excess proteins on top of the grain bed to filter out. Repeat the process several times until the runnings have cleared up, then drain.
Measure how much wort you have drain and get ready for the next sparge. (A time saving tip: Start that wort in the kettle to lessen your boil heat up time.)
You'll add about 1.33qt of hot water (~170°F) per lb of grain, mix, vorlauf, drain.
As you drain some of the second pass, measure the wort's gravity. If it's above 1.015 you can and more hot water and extract more sugars. If it's near 1.010 or lower, then adding more hot water will only extract
excess tannins and few sugars. Tannins are
always extracted, but not nearly in as high a concentration as are extracted when the pOH is as low as that low of a gravity causes. (That last sentence feels wordy, and is probably too much information anyway.) Just stop when you've hit your preboil volume or the gravity of the last batch gets too close to 1.010.
That's actually pretty in-depth, but an adequate explanation of all grain brewing.
Hopefully that helps you want to try all grain, and welcome again!
