First All-Grain Brew Experience!

This past Sunday I officially stepped up my game and brewed my first all-grain batch!!! I'd done 6 or 7 extract brews prior. It went pretty smoothly but was not without some unexpected twists and turns along the way. I chose to do a 6-gallon India Brown Ale which used 14 lbs. of grain (7 varieties) and 5 different hops. I probably could've chosen a simpler recipe to start with but I figured why not, I like to dive right in and get my hands dirty. Overall it was an awesome experience, I learned a ton, and I'm already itching to brew another batch.

The first issue I encountered was with hitting my mash temp. I preheated my mash tun (Coleman cooler) with ~180F water for 15 minutes, then dumped it and added strike water that was at 166F (mash target 153F). This didn't quite get the grain bed up so I added 2 quarts of near boiling water which brought it to 2 degrees over, allowing me to stir for a couple minutes then close the lid at 1 degree over. Everything looked good, I put blankets on the cooler and waited 30 minutes to check the temp. When I checked it had only dropped about 1 degree (excellent), I stirred the grain and closed the lid again and waited. When I checked the temp at the end of the mash I was down another 3 degrees (ruh-roh), so stirring and checking temp at 30 minutes must have allowed more heat out than I hoped. Still no big deal, I was just happy it held as well as it did for my first time!

The other issues I encountered:

-Used too much sparge water (calculated with Sparge Pal on iPhone) and got about an extra gallon in the kettle. I decided to boil longer to compensate but ended up boiling off too much! That was a little frustrating... looked like a lot more in the kettle. But I ended up with about 5.2 gallons and just added water to the fermenter to get up to around 6.

-Sparge water temp of 170 didn't bring my grain bed to 168. I think the highest it reached was 160. I'm curious: what's the negative effect of not doing the mashout? I read that it's not imperative when batch sparging but it didn't say why, or what happens if you don't hit 168.

-Fermentation went ape after about 12 hours and nearly blew the lid off the bucket, so I assume I successfully converted my starches I rigged up a blowoff which helped until the krausen died down. It's now fermenting happily @ 60F ambient temp.

-Brew day ended up being close to 7 hours, mainly because it was my first time and I was pretty unorganized. I also transferred the runnings to my bottling bucket before going to the kettle to get an idea of my volumes, which ate up some time transferring twice.

One thing I'd like to know is how can I calculate my efficiency? The target OG was 1.059 for 6 gallons, I ended up with 1.065 for 5 gallons. Is there a formula I can use?

I'm hooked and excited about moving forward with AG brewing. Hopefully the brew will turn out alright, either way it was a great brewday. I'll keep you guys posted.

 

Sounds like a pretty successful brew day. I use brewersfriend.com for all of my recipe and mash and everything calculations. They have water temperature calculators, boiloff gravity change calculators, and they will calculate every type of efficiency you can think of. Really great tool.

Dropping 3 degrees in the last 30 minutes of the mash isn't too big of a deal. Most of your conversion happens in the first 20-30 minutes anyway so your fermentability profile is pretty established by then.

Not getting the grainbed up to 168 is not a big deal either. People mashout and sparge at this temperature in order to denature all of the enzymes in the mash which will lock in a particular fermentability profile. With batch sparging, you're boiling the wort pretty soon after sparging so this will denature the enzymes. Also, any conversion that happens after a 60-90 minute mash will be fairly minimal. Another reason people mashout and sparge around 170 is just that it makes the runnings drain faster, but the difference between 160 and 170 in probably pretty negligable.

 

You can use an online calculator to figure the efficiency.
http://www.brewersfriend.com/brewhouse-efficiency/

I have a book called Designing Great Beers that explains effciency formulas pretty good. I can dig it up if your interested, though there is quite a bit involved.