1st all-grain,BIAB, RIS...Crazy?!?!

Well I brewed this up yesturday (BIAB), which was my very first all grain attemp. After having to make my own grain bag to hold all of this grain it went fairly smooth. Im not sure how my numbers are as far as did I hit my OG and my efficency.

Grains:
8.5lbs Marris Otter
8.5lbs Golden Promise
1lbs 8oz Roasted Barley
1lbs Special B Malt
12oz Chocolate Malt
8oz Cara-Pils/Dextrine

Hops:
4oz Challenger
2oz Goldings, East Kent

Yeast:
WLP002 (I made to yeast starters for this, which in less than 12 Hrs I had activity)

-Pre Boil Gravity 1.072
-OG 1.082

I don't know if my numbers are off, if they even are, due to doing a BIAB with such a huge grain bill and not getting all the sugars out, also my final batch size was 7.5gal and I was going for 5.25gal but it was getting late and with a 10day old baby it was time for bed. I tried to boil off as much as possible. Im only fermenting 5.25gal.

I hit all my target temps and only lost a few degrees mashing.

Due to Beersmith not having Golden promise i don't know what my gravity readings should be. But I will have beer which im letting it age for months (DEC time frame) so I will just RDWHAHB until then.



It was actually harder to get the grains in! I was very worried that I would rip the bag pulling it out, if I could even get it out. It was alot easier than I thought. Glad I had a pulley to help!!


Mash Time!!



SG! Mmmm, I hope!



Its home for the next 5 months. Activity started in less than 12 hours, huge believer in starters now!!!


All in all BIAB was easy learned things and will hopefully improve on them, next one is going to be a HEF.

 

Still alot of activity but not exploding. Very stoked but along ways till I can drink it.

 

Great looking setup! Hope it comes out awesome

 

congrats.. looks like it'll be a good brew in a few months

 

Thanks

 

So my OG was suppose to be 1.102 according to beer smith, not sure if I inputted everything correctly, and i got 1.082. Why? I hit my pre boil gravity.

I did end up with 2 gal extra and only put 5.25 into the primary so would that have something to do with such a low number? Thanks for the help.

 

What did you do with the extra 2 gallons? I'll take it!!

But yeah, extra water volume lowers OG. Go back into BeerSmith and change your batch size to the 7.5 gallons you actually got, and you should get closer to what your actual OG was.

 

Well I am ashamed to say but I had to dump. Somewhere I have my setup and numbers calculated wrong in beersmith to. I didn't have to top up after the mash so i don't know if the grains didn't absorb as much as they should of due to so much grains and doing a biab but I hit my pre boil reading so it got out what it was suppose to. I did squeeze and let the bag drain.

Just need to fix/tweak my numbers in beer smith but stinks that it doesn't have a setup to biab keggle.

 

You dumped because your numbers were just a bit off?

 

No. No room for the extra. I kept 5.25gal.

 

Oooooooh ok!

Phew, I was worried you dumped the whole thing

 

next time boil longer to get your volume.. but yeah, that's where the numbers got messed up.

 

I stretched it from 60 min to 90 min to boil off. Does it do anything to the hop additions by extending the boil?

 

Save the hop additions for the last 60 minutes of the boil (or whatever the additions call for)

 

Nice work...I think people have climbed Everest w/ less equipment.

 

yeah if you just dumped the 2 gallons that is exactly where the extra sugars went. That is one of the tough aspects of a high gravity brew. To get enough water to extract all the sugars you end up with a lot you have to boil off, in your case 2 extra gallons. If those 2 extra gallons were boiled off you would have been around 1.110, if my math is right.

 

Thanks

Well that is what I was going for like a 1.102 around there. So wonder how my volume was off?

 

Next time FWIW, I would add the bitterring or first hop additon and boil for however long it takes to reduce volume...then make your flavor and aroma additions to reach an acceptable final volume. Bittering additions don't care much 60 vs 90 vs 120 minutes.

 

Your volume calculations were probably right on, it just takes a lot of water to suspend the sugars. For a normal mash (not BIAB because I haven't researched that method) with the grain bill you have listed you are looking at ~6.5 gallons for mashing alone, then to batch sparge it is best to use 2 quarts per lb, so that is another 10 gallons(!). So after grain absorption you would be looking at 12ish gallons of wort that you would need to boil down. These numbers may be off a bit, but should represent the amount of water needed.

So there are three options in this situation, bite the bullet and boil for 5 hours, up the grain bill in expectation of the efficiency hit, or live with it and enjoy your tasty brew.

 

here's the easy way (sort of) to calculate the water needed for BIAB.
batch size + absorption + boil off + trub loss = total water needed.

for MY setup using the recipe in the OP I would take the total grain and determine the absorption by grain X .05. so 20.75 x .05 = 1.0375

batch size desired (for me) 5.5 + 1.0375 + 2.00 + .25 = 8.7875. I would round that up to 9 gallons total water needed to account any additional boil off due to humidity or temp changes. that formula works pretty good for me. I use absorption rate of .05/lb because I squeeze the grain bag for every drop of wort that I can get. if you don't squeeze that much adjust the absorption to .075 or .1 if you don't squeeze at all.

The main thing is, learn your system. learn your preferred way of brewing, adjust the formula to fit your system and you can get pretty close each time to determining the amount of water needed. knowing the water needed you can choose to either do a full volume BIAB, or a dunk sparge or even suspend the grains over the boil kettle and pour sparge water over the grains and then squeeze...or not. As long as YOU are happy with how you do it and the volumes and gravity comes out where you expect, then it's the right way to do it. In the end you'll end up with beer and isn't that what you set out to do?

 

A typical BIAB has around 10 lbs of grain. 10 lbs of grain absorbs about 0.70 gallons of water that you don't get back, even after draining the bag. My 10 gallon BIAB pot boils off about 1.5 gallons/hour, though pots vary on this by thickness and diameter. Anyway, that means for a 5 gallon batch, I need 7.2 gallons of water. I'd typically do the mash in about 4 gallons and do the sparge/rinse with the remaining 3.2 gallons.

BeerSmith 2 has calculation for full volume BIAB AND BIAB with a sparge step, so it can tell you the water volume and temp of the sparge/rinse to get the overall volume of water up to the proper boil volume and mashout temp.

Anyway, just FYI, most 5 gallon BIAB batches with a 60 min boil use closer to 7-8 gallons of total water, not 16.5 or 12 or whatever spyder's post above is calculating. I've done the BIAB with sparge in a 7.5 gallon pot before and been just fine.

 

Where did you get that cool bag from?

 

I concur. I do 7 gallons and end up with 5 gallons of wort for around 11 lbs of grain.

 

Thanks I'm going to use that formula to verify beersmith. Beersmith said I need 11 gal right off the bat. So with that I think maybe it didn't have into account me squeezing the crap out of it. I have an idea on how to maybe get more out of the grains. They make these mechanical sleeves for like a pipe break. You wrap it around the pipe and then tighten it down and stop the leak. Well if I used that around the grains I would get even more out of them, what ya think?

I def needed to get into beersmith and check out my settings. I know they don't have a biab for keggle but I made my own and used the same settings for keggles in the biab portion. All I did was just raised the temp so that was my spare no extra water used.

I went to Joan fabric and bought and made it. It was 24inches lng but def stretch out andh held up. Which built alot of confidence for me. I thought that pulling out the wet grain bag was going to be the hardest

 

And scariest part of the whole brew. But without the pulley it wouldn't of been so smooth.

 

Hey bucks are you a climber? Those biners look pretty unscathed by rock, but I had to ask

 

Lol when I was in Italy I did some. Mostly indoors. I got all the equipment with the intent of climbing out doors more often. Then my tour ran up and time to go back to the US. The wife always wanted me to sell all my stuff but now I've found a use. I told her "see I kept it for a reason".lol

 

Update:


After 9 days at 65f the gravity reading is at 1.022 beersmith said it should be 1.026. I'm going to see if the is any change tomorrow and if not might rack for bulk aging or should I wait?

Taste pretty good!

 

When bulk aging do you leave it in the secondary or let it set in the secondary for awhile and bottle for a few months?

 

High ABV can take a month or longer to carb. I did a 1.080 stout and plan to leave in primary for 4 weeks and then bottle.

 

well... bulk aging is just that... in bulk. leave it in secondary

 

If he hasn't racked yet, does he really need to? That isn't a loaded question.

 

not really.. I normally primary all my beers for 4 weeks, then another week crash cooling. however, if he plans on bulk aging for a couple months, then I would go with a secondary. When aging mead I secondary and if needed tertiary. but that's when aging for a year or more.

 

So i will just let it set in the primary for a week or 2 longer. Rack to secondary and let it set till around Nov and bottle. Thanks.

The sample tasted awesome going to be hard to let it set!