BIAB/partial mash with extract

I haven't even started brewing yet, and I am a little worried. I got the LHBS to crush my grain (BM's Centennial blonde, scaled down to 2.4 gallons) and they even have the option on the sheet to mill grains twice. I checked that off. This is what the grains look like:







As you can see in the last pic, there is some flour & broken pieces are prevalent in the second pic, but it looks like more than a few of the grains are untouched. I do say "looks like" because, as I was sifting through the bag, I was picking up the grains that looked untouched, smashing them between my thumb & forefinger. I'd say less than 1 out of ten (4 out of 50) did not smash with the pressure, so it seems most of those are at least crushed/cracked. But there were a few that were totally not. Now I am hoping for really good efficiency because some of these grains are whole, but it doesn't seem worth my while to try and pick those out & give them a whirl in the blender.

Anyway, stay tuned for this adventure! Any tips/advice are always welcome.

As noted in the title, it's really a mini-mash with extract, because I have 1-1/2 pounds of lite DME I need to use up, so I bought three pounds of grains, as I ran my idea through Brewer's Friend and it said this would give me ~5.25% ABV, 16 IBU's, and an SRM of 6. I say, it oughta be nice, as even the all-extract version I did was awesome!

 

Anybody? Nothin'? I am brewing in just a few hours...

 

I'd be talkin to the lhbs about their mill. Certainly wouldn't expect much for efficiency

 

I think I'll mash for 90 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes.

*crosses fingers*

 

I think 90 minute mash is a good idea. Good luck.
Can't believe they call that double crush.
Santa should bring you a mill

 

Thing is, I have had them double-crush it before, and it looked a lot better. I wonder if they actually did...

Well, water is just now getting up to strike temps, so I am off for a bit.

Thanks, man!

 

How'd your brew go?
I missed my last hop addition yesterday, was chatting away with neighbour and shut down the boil. Started chilling and saw my last hops sitting there....doh!

 

Everything went well. I even took pictures! I just haven't sorted them all yet, I'll do a long write-up later, I have a couple of properties to clean shortly so it will have to wait. Suffice to say, though, with a 75-minute mash of 2.875 pounds of grain (and only 6oz of that was specialty grains), a flameout addition of 1-1/2 pounds of lite DME, and a predicted OG of 1.058 on Brewer's Friend, I hit exactly 1.058! Seems the crush & my process gave me 75% efficiency on the nose (according to BF).

Again, I'll lay out the long story later & get into details.

 

Sometimes I think crushes that look like that have some really stubborn hulls that don't break up with the rest of the kernels. I also had that happen after I cleaned my barley crusher, put it back together & it has a hard time holding the settings on the adjusters. Needs tweaking or less olive oil lube?

 

OK, couple of posts, pics, details, then ask away if I missed anything. I will say, this has upped my confidence in doing a totally AG batch, but I really am limited to 4, maybe 5 pounds of grain overall, and I will still have to top off, at least using my current soup-pot. I thought it was 3 gallons, more like 2.5 - it will all be clearer in a few. I do see I need at least a 4-gallon pot to really even just do 2.5 gallons of beer. Anyway...

OK, so, first... to make beer, we need to drink beer. I am a firm believer.


Now that that is out of the way, here is 1-1/2 gallons of water coming up top temp. I always heard 160 to get to 150, but I checked a brewing calculator and it told me, for my brew tonight, to hit 157.5 to get to my mash temp of 150.


I got up to 159 and said screw it. Doughed in, stirring like crazy while the grains poured out via the old "cut the corner off of the bag" technique. Took a temp measurement 5 minutes later, 150 degrees. Sweet.


Cut to some equipment - this is my drain & sparge setup. Since my pot isn't near large enough, I knew I'd have to sparge so I set up this large metal bowl to both catch any squeezins and to sparge in.


My fermenting vessel, the Mr. Beer LBK - the bowl with the DME in it - my hydrometer - and the 2.5G jug of spring water.


And I have decided to start new posts every time I opened another beer.

/post

 

All right, so, beer #2


Not a bad doppelbock, really. Now, on to... beer! This is what was left in the pot after a 75 minute mash. I had to really fiddle with the heating to keep a constant temp, but except for the first 15 minutes dropping to 148, I kept it at 150 the rest of the hour afterward. Then I lifted the bag, let it drain for a few, and then squeezed it pretty well, twisting the bag up some and putting the muscle to it.


1 gallon of sweet wort out of 1-1/2 gallons of water & just under 3 pounds of grain. This seems low? I dunno...

Ah, crap.

 

Beer #3 - love this stuff, much better than last year's batch IMHO.


This is now a shot of me batch sparging in the bowl. I added a gallon of water at first, and as this pic shows, it was still a little thick, so I grudgingly added another quart of water I had previously filtered from my fridge after this. Water was room-temp.


A muscle-shot (*lol*) of me giving the big squeeze to the bag after sparging & draining in the colander for 5 minutes or so. (Like the temporary tattoo?)


I poured all the spargings & squeezin's back into the pot. This is exactly 2 gallons of sweet wort. I know because I have measured the distance from the top of the pot and I had to really squeeze the bag to get exactly 2 gallons. My grains seemed to absorb more water than I thought. Maybe I didn't let the grains drain long enough. I dunno.


Oh. Um... see you in a second.

 

Beer #4 - this is over a good 3 hour period, I just want to add. *coughs nervously*


Now everything has come to a boil. I deviated from the recipe a bit (all this will be at the end) but I did FWH the initial bittering charge) as I dumped those hops into the BK after pulling the BIAB bag and then turned on the heat while I sparged. So, those hops are already in, set the timer for 45 minutes, and start washing up some of my mess.


OK, so my pics of the hops additions I took didn't turn out. Too washed out, too blurry, one didn't even load right so it was an error. *sigh* Anyways, at T-20 I added a charge, then at T-5 I added a charge. Then, the DME & the last charge of hops @ flameout. Pot was set in the sink with cold water and started to cool. No pics for some reason. *whistles innocently* About this time, I took the water I had boiled & cooled previously and mixed in half a pack of Notty.


5 Minutes later, I see the yeast getting thick on the top of the water. Covered it back up with foil and let it sit for 20 more minutes while I continued cooling the wort.

 

Sick!

I love to see the process! I was thinking about doing a stovetop PM soon. I won't be able to brew outside for long.
I was going to follow this article, (http://byo.com/malt/item/507-countertop-partial-mashing).

Keep it up!

 

Beer #5. No pic. *whistles more*

I had to add ice to the water bath on the third water change to get it down in the 60s. No pics. Left my thermometer at my buddy's place when he brewed a kit this weekend, and my backup thermometer didn't go below 100 F (it's a meat thermometer) so I had to keep sampling the sweet wort, 3 times, to know I had the wort in the 60s. It was sweet malt heaven. No pics. Carefully poured the wort into the LBK. No pics. Had to add almost half a gallon of water to top off to 2.4 gallons final volume. Poured the water from 2 feet or so over the opening to get some aeration, plus I stirred it vigorously with a wire whisk afterward to mix the water & wort thoroughly. Took a gravity reading.


Notice the reading looks like 1.060, really 1.059. Then take into account my hydro reads .002 high, so 1.057. Temperature strip said it was 73 degrees, corrects to 1.058. My recipe in Brewer's Friend said I'd get 1.058. BINGO! Even with the OK but not-great crush, I got 75% efficiency.

Now, I have to add the yeast. Strangely enough, my yeast foam seemed to have sunk & my hydrated yeast looks just like the other people's stuff I was looking at questioningly in another thread. Heh. *eats some crow*


I mean - EXACTLY like the other people's yeast...


Anyway, I swirled it up, dumped it in, and put on the lid. Set the LBK in its cooler, a couple of ice bottles to keep everything cool (I know my system, here) and we're all set.


This morning, no action. This afternoon after I got home from work, there was a thin layer of foam on the top, so it was about 12 hours before visible activity showed. Sweet. I don't want to keep opening up the lid, but I'll get one more pic at high krausen & update here.

OK, so, this was my recipe & process:
2-1/2# Vienna
6 oz Carapils
4 oz C-10L
75 minute mash at 150 F in 1-1/2G water
Sparge with enough water to get to 2G in the boil
.125 oz Nugget FWH
45 minute boil
.125 oz Centennial @ 20 minutes
.125 oz Centennial @ 5 minutes
1.5# Light DME @flameout
.250 oz Centennial @ flameout
Cool to >70 degrees F, pitched 5.5g hydrated Nottingham yeast after topping off to 2.4 gallons.

Yes, I went with 2.5 pounds of Vienna for some reason. Sue me. I figure for such a light coloured beer, it's a malt-bomb anyway, so... why not? And I wanted the Centennial to come out but not hopstand this beer, so I went with Nugget for the bittering and put a "large" flameout addition of Centennial to make this nice. The first time I made this beer, I used all Centennial and I didn't want to buy 2 ounces of hops this time, so I used (almost) all Centennial again.

OG 1.058, expected FG of 1.013 but Notty always goes a little lower than BF gives, so this is going to be another 6% or more beer. I tried to get this one to be 5.5-5.8%, but I have a feeling that this won't be my first beer under 6%. Shoulda gone with just 2 pounds of Vienna. *lol*

16-18 IBUs, SRM of 5.5. Gorgeous.

I think that about covers everything. I had fun, and can't wait to see how this turns out! Please, all comments & questions are appreciated.

 

Yeah, I'd say 90-95% of what looked whole were crushed/cracked, at the least. I did OK with it, but next time, I want to make sure what their "double crush" looks like.

 

Thanks, man! It was fun, if a bit longer than I thought (mostly 'cos I got a late start) and if I were doing an IPA with a hop-stand, it would have been even longer. As it was, I put that baby to bed about 3:30 in the morning, after firing up the heat to get the strike water to temp at almost exactly 11:30PM.

 

Update, as promised!

This was the beer 16 hours after pitching yeast:



And this is the beer 32 hours after pitching the yeast:



Pretty...

 

im not familiar with those mr beer jugs. How does pressure get out? From the looks of that last pic, you may need to rig some sort of a blowoff before bed or leaving for work

 

also, thanks for not making a "OH NO WHATS WRONG WITH MY BEER?!?!" topic when you didnt have activity at 12hrs

 

It's pretty low-tech - the threads have notches that allow the CO² to escape. If it overflows though, yeah, you have to clean a bunch of mess and spend some time without the top. I will admit *knocks on wood* I have made 2.4-2.5 gallons of much bigger beers, using Notty, and never had more than a slight spit-up to come out of the top. This krausen is about as big as it's going to get I'd say, and it's not coming to the neck, so I am safe. Ambient air temp in the cooler is 55°, wort when I checked it at the last pic was 61°. As I said, I know my temp-control system here.

 

Thanks for all the great pictures Slym. I'm a big fan of threads where people show their methods. Really cool. More pictures, better good.


I think you LHBS crush is terrible BTW.

 

successful brew....right on.

 

Just one more thing. You don't really need so much water for your rehydration. ~120ml is adequate. About half what you've got there. No biggie.

I like your fermentation temperature control. Nicely done.

 

Thanks, everyone.

Really, I thought more would be said about my choice/amount of Vienna malt. All I know is, it smells heavenly when I go to change ice bottles...

 

For some reason, (maybe your activity level on here) I was sure you were an AG, experienced brewer. Not to say those doing partial mash or even just extract aren't experienced. I run a pretty ghetto setup, and just keep adding equipment when I can. I finally got a 3500w induction plate, so at least I can get to mash temp and boiling much quicker now. Next on my list is a 50L pot. Right now I'm only able to boil in a 19L pot (although it reads 1L short actually).

Anyways, point being, I do BIAB, but since I have a few buckets, and I got an infection in one at one point, I decided to make that my mash tun. So then I get about 17.5L in the boil. Then I do the really ghetto thing of sparging those grains and topping off with non-hopped wort instead of water. My LHBS crush looks an awful lot like that even after asking them to double crush it (I just can't imagine the efficiency people are getting that aren't doing BIAB). I was getting about 55% efficiency with just using their double crush and topping off with water. Then I started putting those grains into the blender and getting it to practically flour, and doing the topping off with non-hopped wort, and my efficiency has now gone up to about 65%. Just some things to think about for you, I guess. Especially just grinding up the grains.

Also, hilarious about the yeast!

 

Big ol' chunk of crow I ate on that...



And yeah, I post a lot and absorb a lot of what I read on here, but I haven't been brewing a year yet. This was going to be an AG batch, my first, but I had the DME sitting here and it was already a month old. Didn't want to get clumps and whatnot.

I have an APA that I think I am going to brew next, if I can, and it will be AG. I might even have a bigger pot by then.

 

Put this in the fridge tonight for cold crashing, as krausen dropped 2 days ago, and took a gravity sample beforehand. This is day 8 after pitching yeast. Brewer's Friend estimated 1.013 for this beer, and they are always off. My corrected reading was 1.008. My calculated ABV was 5.8%, I hit 6.5%. I did well on both mash efficiency and yeast attenuation.

I also have yet to make a beer under 6% ABV, and I have tried.

 

Same technique, different batch - just got my grains doughed in (2 lbs in 3.5 quarts of water, holding at 150° F for 75 minutes). 50% 2-row, 25% wheat, & 25% rye. Adding 2 lbs of lite LME at flameout. All Cascade hops for this one - .25oz at 60 minutes, .5 at 20, .5 at 5, then a 2oz hop-stand when the wort cools off to 170. Nottingham yeast. I am looking at 35-40 IBUs, app. OG of 1.055 & FG supposedly 1.014 - but I know Notty will take it down farther. Supposed to work out to 5.5% ABV, probably will be above 6 again. We'll see.



(Sorry, no pics this time - waiting for my first true AG batch for that!)

 

Hit 1.056 for my OG. Gorgeous. Whole-cone hops really do absorb a lot of wort, so my volume was down over what I wanted. Can't wait to see how this turns out!

 

I just dry-hopped this latest batch yesterday (.5oz Centennial & .5oz Columbus pellets - I am not dry-hopping with the whole-cone hops, nuh-uh), along with 20mL of sugar syrup (NOT simple syrup - this is a 3:1 sugar:water ratio syrup I make to sweeten different things in my kitchen), so I figured I added enough sugar to bottle-prime maybe 6 bottles. Got a nice little krausen going today, more than I thought! Now I am worried that the krausen wont drop out before the dry-hop is over (I like going 4-5 days). Am I wrong in not wanting to bottle until it drops out? I just don't want to have to hit it with more hops to make up for any aroma loss I might get for letting the beer sit for longer than I want.

I wanted to try this technique with a small secondary fermentation at the dry-hop addition, if only to have a little CO² "blanket" form. Now I am wondering if the extra time waiting will be worth it...

 

a new krausen came back after you added the syrup? Ive racked to my bottling bucket through persistent krausen before. As long as the sugar ferments out (which shouldn't take long since its theoretically 100% fermentable) id say you can bottle. So just keep an eye on the FG I guess

 

Yeah, about a quarter-inch thick krausen covers the top of my beer now. Maybe I am worrying too much, and it will drop off fast since it wasn't that much sugar added. This is new to me, and I guess I didn't think it through!



Thanks for the advice, m00ps.

 

Krausen is already clearing out, not even covering the top anymore. I imagine it will be totally gone by the time I am ready to cold-crash (Monday night).

 

Well, took a gravity sample before cold-crashing since it was already at 66° F (hydro is set to 60, but that's not enough of a variance to need a correction), and my FG was 1.007, a full 6 points lower than what BF predicted, but about where I thought it would land.

Beer is 6.2% ABV & 35 IBUs. Nice colour, mostly due to the LME, as my mini-mash was very light. Pics to come in a few weeks, when I finally test one.

I have yet to make a beer under 6%... apparently, I am incapable. This one was supposed to be about 5.4%

*LOL*