all graining it

[Dkidwell83]

this is probably gonna sound dumb, but how much square footage is neccessary for a comfortable all grain set up. I have a rather small kitchen in my apartment and as of now, fermentation takes place in my closet. the place is kept at a constant 68 degrees so its no big deal, but i havent done all grain brewing and it seems to me that its the only way to go if want the best beer. also, if some one could explain in retard terms how to do all grain brewing from start to pitching the yeast i would be much obliged.

 

[The Pol]

Go to www.howtobrew.com and read about all grain, look at my setup here for all grain. It measures 72" tall, 36" wide and 18" deep. It is used for brewing AND storing all of my equipment...
http://s168.photobucket.com/albums/u189/PolTavern/

Pol

 

[Beerrific]

If you don't have the space you can make excellent beers doing partial boils with extracts. If it turns out you don't have the space, check out partial mashes which you can do in your bottling bucket only thing you need is a big nylon grain bag. Also, there a few things you can do to make your extract brews nearly identical to all grain. Good luck!

 

[RichBrewer]

Try doing Partial Mashes. It takes up a lot less room and you can still do partial boils on the stove top. I great solution if you don't have the space.

Here's the mini mash/lauter tun I made. I used a three gallon cooler and I can mash about 5 pounds of grain in it. If I remember, I ended up with about 3 or so gallons for the boil. It was also fairly inexpensive to make.

 

[Dkidwell83]

so do i bring the water to proper temp then add the grains an hold it there for 30-90 min, the drop in mash tun. how do i rinse the grains?


Richbrewer - i see your setup in the pic-whats in the bucket with the sipgot and how did you get the wort into the tun? just steep the grains and then pour it all into the tun? ie gatorade cooler. ive read about sustaining temps in tun with is you gator, how do you achieve that?

 

[The Pol]

Id do it all in a cooler, and I do, look at my system. The top tank has sparge water, the middle tank is where the grain is mashed and lautered and the pot on the bottom, of course, is where you run the wort.

 

[Dkidwell83]

so the top is your sparge water or the clean hot water you use to rinse the grains and the second level is the tun, so what goes in the tun. do you put the steeped grains only or the steeped grains and the water you steeped them in or just the grains and let them soak out in the water from the sparge tank?

sorry to be so thick headed

 

[RichBrewer]

Richbrewer - i see your setup in the pic-whats in the bucket with the sipgot and how did you get the wort into the tun? just steep the grains and then pour it all into the tun? ie gatorade cooler. ive read about sustaining temps in tun with is you gator, how do you achieve that?

The bucket was only used to raise the tun up to a height where the wort would drain into the kettle. The mini mash tun works like a big one. Strike water is added to the tun then the grains are poured in and mixed well. The mash then rests for an hour before being batch sparged. In the bottom of the mash tum is some braided hose that filters the grains leaving clear wort to drain into the kettle. the tun does a great job maintaining temps. It didn't drop one degree in 60 minutes.

 

[RichBrewer]

Here's a thread I did for the one I made. It is a huge thread but it explains everything I did.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=8805

 

[The Pol]

The center tank, the lower cooler, on my system is where I pour the strike water, and the grains, it mashes in there. In the bottom there is a SS false bottom, if you look at my photobucket site you can see how it is set up. When it is done mashing in there, I just crack open the ball valve and let er run into my boil kettle. I crack open the sparge tank valve the same ammount and let the sparge arm spray hot water over the grain bed...

 

[Dkidwell83]

so you have water in with grains-strike water- at around 155 deg and then you mix it with the grains in the lower cooler for an hour. the you open it up and at the same time open the valve on the top one-you sparge or rinse water and let all of this run down into the bottom pot. so if you are making a 5 ga. batch and you have 1 gal. of strike water, the your sparge water is 5 gal.?

 

[Dkidwell83]

so you have strike water in with the grains and also have water in the sparge bucket. you soak the grains in the strike water for about an hour, the open the spigot on the tun and the sparge tank at the same time. right? so if i want to make a five gal batch of wort, and i have a gal of strike water, ill have 4 gals of sparge water? and my strike water with be around 155 deg and my sparge water around 170 deg?

 

[The Pol]

You will have to heat your strike water to about 165F... so it will rest at about 153-155... the grain will cool the water significantly. You will have to calculate that, I have a spreadsheet that does it for me. You need to use about 1.25qt/lb of grain. If you have 10lbs of grain, you will have about 3 gallons. I never measure my sparge water, if I am brewing 5 gallons, I just heat up 5-6 gallons. You will run off about 6-7 gallons because when you boil you will lose about a gallon of water.

 

[Dkidwell83]

so once im done mashing and all my strike water and sparge water has drained into my pot, i bring it to a boil and add my hops at this point or do add my specialty grains, or do i add them in with the rest of my grain when i do my mashing?

 

[The Pol]

If you are going to the trouble of doing a partial mash, you might as well do all grain, because you are mashing anyway. In that case, you'd have all of your grains crushed and mashed together. You run your sparge until you get 6-6.5 gallons of runoff OR your RUNNINGS gravity reads 1.010. You have to be careful not to go below this as your PH will sky rocket and you will start to extract tannins from the grain hulls.

 

[FlyGuy]

this is probably gonna sound dumb, but how much square footage is neccessary for a comfortable all grain set up. I have a rather small kitchen in my apartment...

I have done AG comfortably in my kitchen, and here is my setup below:

You can also look at my signature to see how I built most of my gear. I use two 5 gallon pots and two coolers (you only really need one cooler, though, if you are using two pots -- see my post here for details). I also built a cheap steam injection system for step-mashing, but that isn't necessary either.

Overall, a system like this is cheap to construct and works really well. And with the steam mash system it allows you to brew almost any beer. And it takes up a LOT less space than a big 3 tier HERMS or RIMS system, but still retains most of the advantages.