My First Grain Batch and the Lessons Learned

[IwanaBrich]

After many years of brewing beer I finally brewed my first "all grain batch"!! I used an IPA recipe that I got from my local homebrew supply. The process went fairly smoothly, but it was ton of work. It made me realize that I'll need to upgrade a few things if I'm going to continue down this road.

I used a 10+ gallon cooler that I bought a number of years ago on ebay as my Mash Tun. I used copper pipe with slits cut in them (facing down) as the manifold. I was amazed how well this held the heat and how well the copper manifold strained out the husks and junk. I used a spare cooler to hold the sparge water and my trusty 11 gallon stainless steel brew pot was used to heat all the water.

Using odd pieces of furniture to get the height I needed worked (I used gravity instead of pumps), but not great. So the first I lesson learned is that I need to build a brew stand. I will need to add a second burner to it and I'll have to buy another kettle (with a ball valve and maybe thermometer) so I can heat the water for mashing and lautering without having to pour hot water into the coolers. Lifting 4 to 5 gallons of very hot water was harder than I thought.

I'm also going to look for a better thermometer like a MINI HANDHELD TERMOCOUPLE METER MODEL #MTC with a waterproof thermocouple probe like PTFE/FEP TIP PROBES Model: 113-372/373/375-T that I can just lay inside the mash tun so I can remotely monitor the temp. Opening and closing the mash tun to check the temp, just didn't sound like a good idea.

As for the new kettle. I was thinking of buying a 15 gallon pot just in case I wanted to do 10 gallon batches. Is this large enough for 10 gallon batches? Should I look for welded fittings or not? Does it make a difference? What about a thermometer? Are these accurate enough?

If I don shift to 10 gallon gallon batches I was thinking that I could use my existing 11 gallon brew pot to heat up the mash and lautering water. Will it be large enough or do I need to change it out too? At the very least, I'll need to add a ball valve to it.

Can anyone direct me to some interesting gravity fed brew stand plans? I own a 210 Amp Mig Welder, so welding is not an issue.

Well I can honestly say that it was a lot more work using all grain, but the time was well spent. It was one of the most relaxing days that I've spent in a long long time... Lastly the beer is fermenting away in my basement and it smells incredible! I can't wait to drink it.

Thanks

Bob

 

[blizz81]

My thoughts:


- your opinion may vary, but there may not be a need for constant temp monitoring in your mash tun, especially if your cooler holds temps pretty well. Take temp after dough-in, take temp before running wort. What else do you need to know?

- if you're batch sparging, the size of the kettle needed might depend on how big of beers you brew and how much you care about efficiency. One of the things that comes into the efficiency equation is sparge water volume and if you're maintaining a constant mash thickness for your strike water, as you brew big beers, you'll find you'll run into a ceiling on sparge volume if you wish to maintain your boil targets.

In my head this has an almost exponential effect because to overcome the efficiency loss, you'll add more grain...but then you'll have more strike water / first runnings and even less sparge water. We brew a lot of bigger beers and I try to find a happy medium with a higher pre-boil target volume + longer boil to make my target volume in fermenter...a lot of times in the 7.5-8 gal range to start for a 5gal batch.

Just something to consider. I think if you brew average gravity beers a 15 gal kettle is probably fine for 10gal batches. Not sure how this might change if you fly sparge. For me, it wouldn't work with our bigger beers. Just something to think about.


- probably don't be too discerning about welded fittings. Especially if you're in the 15gal range, you could go with a sanke keg and do weldless fittings fine, I would think. Would think you could do weldless to a normal SS kettle too (re: using your kettle as a HLT), but worth some reading. Again, re: 11gal being large enough for a HLT for 10gal batches, it would depend on your beers and your mash thickness. For me, for an 8gal preboil / 6gal in fermenter batch of belgian quad, we just did 21lb of grain at 1.25qt / lb + area under false bottom = 7.44gal of strike water.

- I bought a thermoworks hand unit + two probes that connect, trying to hedge between supposed accuracy and cost. Not the cheapest route there...and testing against the $4 digital thermopen thingees they have at Harbor Freight, the $4 probe was within 0.5*F at 151. Hard to get a good gauge of cost vs. accuracy vs. value vs. quality here, I like to think my thermoworks + probes will last and maintain calibration fine, but all depends on how much sleep you want to lose at night. We went for a couple years on the $4 pens - one broke with a very tiny tap on the countertop.

 

[IwanaBrich]

I honestly don't think I'd be making "large" beer in large 10 gallon batches. I'd only consider making 10 gallons of the beer that goes quick. I'm not saying that I won't make strongs beers and barley wine, I just won't make them in big batches. I don't think my mash Tun could handle all the grain, anyway.

So there are no real issues or down side with buying a 15 gallon stainless pot, drilling a few holes hole it and use weldless fittings?

I appreciate your thoughts.