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I don't bother taking hydrometer readings until my wort goes into the fermenter. If you have a proven recipe, or have calculated the sugars based on your grain, and have mashed at 148-153, then you should get good extraction and hit your gravity. I have brewed over 30 AG batches this way and am...

Ray Daniels says in DGB that some award winning beers were made by extract, so don't sell it short; you can make very good beers with extract, and even better beers with a partial mash. If all grain seems confusing, you are not alone. Probably the biggest hurdle you will face is not knowing...

Let me see if I got this straight. You mash around 153 I presume, and then heat your MLT directly, and then sparge with 175F water...and your grain temp DROPS to 140-150? Unless I'm reading this wrong, it sounds like you're continually heating the mash, so a temp drop seems counterintuitive to...

I tend to just heat my sparge water to 175, do a vorlauf, then then start sparging. Sometimes I'll put a gallon of boiling water in my mash tun to loosen things up beforehand. I'm not sure why people use the reasoning "to stop the enzymes" when calling for a mashout. If there is no more starch...

That's exactly what I did just before the d-rest and then about a month into the lagering. For the former, it simply tasted young and still had residual sweetness, so I went ahead with the rest. After a month lagering, it was hard to get a good taste reading due to it being flat. I let it...

Another tip is to have a couple cups of boiling water on hand when you dough in. If you're a little low on your temp and don't want to thin out your mash with a large amount of strike water necessary to get there, a smaller amount of boiling water stirred in will raise your mash temp without...

Another option is to ferment in a large bucket or barrel. I ferment 5 gallon batches in a 9 gallon plastic barrel with a screw-on lid that has an airlock grommet. Plenty of head space and easy to clean.

I've read a bit on d-rests and the general school of thought is to warm the beer from 50-ish to almost 70 when fermentation is about 2/3 or 3/4 of the way complete, then transfer and gradually lower the temps about 5 degrees a day until you get around 32-ish. Then lager here for a month or two...

I bought probably a dozen AG kits from them, and most were very good. I didn't care for their cream ale. The irish red was the best.

Yeah, let it go for 3 or 4 weeks. Then you can skip secondary all together. I almost never secondary unless it is a belgian, lager, or big beer. Also, don't worry about warming your beer if it was fermenting in the mid to low 60's. I often ferment Wyeast 1056 all the way down to 54 with no ill...

I'm Joe Polvino from Rochester, NY. I've been brewing for about 14 years, started extract, took a few years off, then took on all grain brewing with a passion. My favorite beers are lighter gravity beers, and I also enjoy some belgians like Hoegaarden and most from Ommegang. Another hobby...

Yeah, I guess I never thought of it that way! To me, batch sparging is: fill, stir, recirc, drain, repeat. My process is: fill, stir, recirc, fly sparge for a while, repeat fill+stir+recirc, fly sparge some more.

I certainly could, since my rig easily supports both fly and batch sparging, but I'd have to modify my manifold to a stainless braid to batch sparge. Plus I enjoy the simplicity of just balancing the in and out water flow with fly sparging. Also, I'm not convinced a full-on batch sparge would...

I fly sparge and regularly get around 85-88%. What I do is fly sparge until I get about half my pre-boil volume, then shut down the tun output and then add another gallon or so of water to the tun. Then I stir the mash well, vorlauf, and then resume sparging into the boil pot. When I'm about 1.5...