AG buying questions / opinions needed

[67coupe390]

I'll be doing less business with him for sure!
One add-on I think I'll put on the mash tun is a 12" thermometer. If I mount it in one of the cup holders in the lid and drill a small hole to put the probe through. Should hopefully work well and keep me from having to open the lid and let out the heat to check the temp. Thank you all for all the help. I'll post my first all grain batch.

 

[Orfy]

I'll be doing less business with him for sure!
One add-on I think I'll put on the mash tun is a 12" thermometer. If I mount it in one of the cup holders in the lid and drill a small hole to put the probe through. Should hopefully work well and keep me from having to open the lid and let out the heat to check the temp. Thank you all for all the help. I'll post my first all grain batch.

Sound like a good idea but if the cooler is up to scratch you'll find the temperature hardly drops and in future mashes you'll not need to monitor the temp.

 

[67coupe390]

Sound like a good idea but if the cooler is up to scratch you'll find the temperature hardly drops and in future mashes you'll not need to monitor the temp.

Oh O.K. maybe I'll hold off a bit then and not drill a hole in the cooler. My wife saw my new cooler and said that I should use the old one for brewing and give this one to her. Yah-right! I picked the coleman extreme 70qt. and it really would be a good cooler for picnics.

 

[67coupe390]

A 48 quart cooler should do fine and hold enough grain for most 10 gallon brews if you're getting good efficiency, and I think you are planning on a final volume of 5 gallons, no?

With something as large as a 70qt you might not retain heat as well since there is so much surface area of grain exposed to the air above the grain bed. I could be all wrong about that, but it seems like your grain bed for a 5 gallon (finished) brew will be pretty thin in a big cooler. What are the inside dimensions of the cooler?

I figured I'd just spend the extra $8.50 and get the 70qt. now instead of the 52qt. I know myself and I'm sure that I'll want to do large batches soon. Here are the inside dimensions about: 11" 25" 12" as it goes up it gets about an 1" bigger at the top.

 

[Orfy]

For a 23 batch a typical amount of grain may be around 6kg for beer around 6%

For that you'd need to add around 16L of water. running of 9L
Which means you need to run off about 21l from sparge so I do it on 2 batches.

Hope that helps.