Beavdowg
Well-Known Member
I've been building up to all-graining for several months now. I modified a Sanke keg as a boil kettle with a nice drain valve. I built a rib-cage style immersion chiller that worked awesome on an extract batch. I converted a cooler with a weldless ball valve and SS braid (the braid part turned out awesome, if I say so myself, the ball valve from bargain fittings still has a slow slow drip leak. I can't get it to stop.) I researched batch sparging over and over and over again, and watched hours of youtube AG videos. I feel like I understand the process pretty well. I purchased all the ingredients for Ed's Hause Pale Ale and went to work. I started at approx. 6:45pm last night and finally fell into bed at 3:00am, over 8 hours later!! I actually left a few small items to clean for today so it would of been longer. I told myself last night if this is the best I can do, forget it. That's just too long to brew 5 gals. of beer!
Here's what happened:
I used the mash calculator from brew365.com to figure out all the temps and volumes. I heated up 14 qts of water to 180* and put that into my MLT to preheat. I waited about 10 minutes and the temp was already down to 163*. I was shooting for 164* so I thought I'd be ok. I doughed in and stirred for a couple minutes. I checked the mash temp and it was already down to 149* just a couple minutes after I doughed in so I added approx. 1/2 qt. of 158* water and that brought the mash temp up to 151.9*. I figured I could live with 1/10th of a degree off. Well I noticed that the lid to my MLT was very warm whereas the sides of the MLT were undetectable, so I put 2 blankets over the lid. 38 minutes later I checked the temp at it was already down to 150.1*. After 62 minutes the mash temp had fallen to 147.8* How the hell can I do this if I'm losing 4* in an 1 hour, I thought! So I continued to carry out a double batch sparge to get 6.5 gal of wort with a pre-boil gravity of 1.045. Now this gravity was when the wort was basically maybe in the 150* degree range, I forgot to take a temp of the sample. So I'm going to assume that I at least hit the 1.051 OG called for in Ed's recipe. How do you cool the pre-boil wort down enough to be able to calculate a gravity when it's coming out of the MLT so stinking hot? Well, as rough as the mash went I calculated I got about a 75% mash extraction efficiency. I can live with that for my first go-around.
So here is where things started to go south: I did the boil, which took forever. I'll bet it took 30-40 minutes just to get my wort to a boil and I'm using the SP-10 185K BTU fryer. I couldn't believe it. Well I decided to add my bittering hops to the pot before it achieved boil as I thought it'd be a sort of first wort hopping, advanced move, eh? So everything went fine with the boil other than it taking FOREVER. This is where things started to get bad. In a sanke keg 5gals of wort doesn't come up very far on the keg, probably not even 1/2 way up. Well, that left maybe only a 1/4 of the copper coils of my immersion chiller submersed into the wort. So it took probably 35 minutes to get my wort down to 80*. Since I had just read earlier in the day yesterday that my LOT of Nottingham yeast had been recalled I felt I could live with 80* to put into the fermentor since it'd be 8-12 hours before I could get new yeast and pitch. I opened the sweet valve on my kettle and began draining into the fermentor. I was thinking this is awesome not having to siphon or lift the heavy kettle and try and pour into the fermentor. Well, after about 2.75 gals my wort flow came to a halting screach. I had to rush to get my Easy siphon out and soaking in the iodophore so I could drain the rest of my wort out. My hose wasn't quite long enough so it was a bear to get the siphon started as I was trying so hard to not let the lower end of the hose touch anything to maintain sanitization. Uggh, I finally got it started and slowly siphoned every thing out. I did lose the siphon once in there somehow while trying to reposition the pick up end. I only got about 4.9 gals into the fermentor so I added a little water to bring it a hair above the 5 gal mark. I usually like to start with about 5.5 gals in the fermentor so that I actually keg 5 gals. Oh, well, at this point I had had enough, I just added water straight out of my faucet. I figured I used to put a ton of tap water in my fermentor when I first started brewing since I couldn't do a full boil so I'm hoping this won't ruin the whole thing. I pitched today with Safale-05 after shaking the crap out of the fermentor to aerate the wort. For some reason at the time I pitched I thought it'd be a good idea to shake up the fermentor after I pitched to get the yeast down into the wort. But after I did this and saw some yeast on the side of the fermentor I thought that might of been a bad idea. With dry ale yeast do you guys just sprinkle it on top and leave it or do you try and shake the yeast into the wort?
My biggest questions that I need to straighten out before my next attempt are:
1) What else can I do to not lose so much heat in my MLT? I preheated it for 10 minutes. My cooler isn't one of those "EXtreme" ones so I'm wondering if just a good ole fashion plastic cooler doesn't have good enough insulation to hold the temps. Also because clearly all the heat was being lost out the lid I wonder if I should try and shoot some additional insulation into the lid.
2) How can I get my kettle ball valve not to clog? I put a copper sponge thingy underneath the pick up tube hoping that it'd keep all the hops out of the tube and not clog it, but clearly that didn't work. I did use whole whops this time to try and maximize the utilization and after tasting my gravity samples I think it worked but I've got to figure out a way to be able to not clog the drain. Suggestions please.
3) I've got to shorten the brew day or I'll never get the time to brew again. I've only got 1 cooker so I'm limited there. Suggestions here?
I appreciate all the help. This site is great! Sorry to sound so pissy but last night's brew session took it all out of me, pretty frustrating.
thanks for all the help
Here's what happened:
I used the mash calculator from brew365.com to figure out all the temps and volumes. I heated up 14 qts of water to 180* and put that into my MLT to preheat. I waited about 10 minutes and the temp was already down to 163*. I was shooting for 164* so I thought I'd be ok. I doughed in and stirred for a couple minutes. I checked the mash temp and it was already down to 149* just a couple minutes after I doughed in so I added approx. 1/2 qt. of 158* water and that brought the mash temp up to 151.9*. I figured I could live with 1/10th of a degree off. Well I noticed that the lid to my MLT was very warm whereas the sides of the MLT were undetectable, so I put 2 blankets over the lid. 38 minutes later I checked the temp at it was already down to 150.1*. After 62 minutes the mash temp had fallen to 147.8* How the hell can I do this if I'm losing 4* in an 1 hour, I thought! So I continued to carry out a double batch sparge to get 6.5 gal of wort with a pre-boil gravity of 1.045. Now this gravity was when the wort was basically maybe in the 150* degree range, I forgot to take a temp of the sample. So I'm going to assume that I at least hit the 1.051 OG called for in Ed's recipe. How do you cool the pre-boil wort down enough to be able to calculate a gravity when it's coming out of the MLT so stinking hot? Well, as rough as the mash went I calculated I got about a 75% mash extraction efficiency. I can live with that for my first go-around.
So here is where things started to go south: I did the boil, which took forever. I'll bet it took 30-40 minutes just to get my wort to a boil and I'm using the SP-10 185K BTU fryer. I couldn't believe it. Well I decided to add my bittering hops to the pot before it achieved boil as I thought it'd be a sort of first wort hopping, advanced move, eh? So everything went fine with the boil other than it taking FOREVER. This is where things started to get bad. In a sanke keg 5gals of wort doesn't come up very far on the keg, probably not even 1/2 way up. Well, that left maybe only a 1/4 of the copper coils of my immersion chiller submersed into the wort. So it took probably 35 minutes to get my wort down to 80*. Since I had just read earlier in the day yesterday that my LOT of Nottingham yeast had been recalled I felt I could live with 80* to put into the fermentor since it'd be 8-12 hours before I could get new yeast and pitch. I opened the sweet valve on my kettle and began draining into the fermentor. I was thinking this is awesome not having to siphon or lift the heavy kettle and try and pour into the fermentor. Well, after about 2.75 gals my wort flow came to a halting screach. I had to rush to get my Easy siphon out and soaking in the iodophore so I could drain the rest of my wort out. My hose wasn't quite long enough so it was a bear to get the siphon started as I was trying so hard to not let the lower end of the hose touch anything to maintain sanitization. Uggh, I finally got it started and slowly siphoned every thing out. I did lose the siphon once in there somehow while trying to reposition the pick up end. I only got about 4.9 gals into the fermentor so I added a little water to bring it a hair above the 5 gal mark. I usually like to start with about 5.5 gals in the fermentor so that I actually keg 5 gals. Oh, well, at this point I had had enough, I just added water straight out of my faucet. I figured I used to put a ton of tap water in my fermentor when I first started brewing since I couldn't do a full boil so I'm hoping this won't ruin the whole thing. I pitched today with Safale-05 after shaking the crap out of the fermentor to aerate the wort. For some reason at the time I pitched I thought it'd be a good idea to shake up the fermentor after I pitched to get the yeast down into the wort. But after I did this and saw some yeast on the side of the fermentor I thought that might of been a bad idea. With dry ale yeast do you guys just sprinkle it on top and leave it or do you try and shake the yeast into the wort?
My biggest questions that I need to straighten out before my next attempt are:
1) What else can I do to not lose so much heat in my MLT? I preheated it for 10 minutes. My cooler isn't one of those "EXtreme" ones so I'm wondering if just a good ole fashion plastic cooler doesn't have good enough insulation to hold the temps. Also because clearly all the heat was being lost out the lid I wonder if I should try and shoot some additional insulation into the lid.
2) How can I get my kettle ball valve not to clog? I put a copper sponge thingy underneath the pick up tube hoping that it'd keep all the hops out of the tube and not clog it, but clearly that didn't work. I did use whole whops this time to try and maximize the utilization and after tasting my gravity samples I think it worked but I've got to figure out a way to be able to not clog the drain. Suggestions please.
3) I've got to shorten the brew day or I'll never get the time to brew again. I've only got 1 cooker so I'm limited there. Suggestions here?
I appreciate all the help. This site is great! Sorry to sound so pissy but last night's brew session took it all out of me, pretty frustrating.
thanks for all the help