BIAB vs AG recipes

[SoCal-Doug]

Yup, my local grocery store sells RO for 39 cents per gallon ... or 5 gal for $1.89. That's hard to beat. The pulley is also a must! Living in Minnesota, my basement temperature is 62 degrees F. Too warm for a lager, but not bad for ale.

Not sure about your part of the country, but in the southwest "water" stores are becoming more popular, most commonly in "lower socioeconomic" areas of town. You might do a search in your area. I found a couple places that sell RO water (and have full commercial RO setups in house) for 20 cents a gallon. Probably because our tap water around here really does taste terrible and barely passes state and federal standards.

 

[Owly055]

The idea that you must crush finer is really not valid in my opinion, or from what experience I've had using grain crushed at the home brew store. I would however have them crush twice. There is more than one way people measure efficiency, but who cares? Efficiency is less important than product quality. With a finer crush, you will end up with more trub, so even though your OG measures high, your net efficiency is reduced, as you brew fewer bottles of beer due to the trub. I've hit over 90% calculated efficiency with BIAB using an .030 feeler between my rollers..... which was standard for me. The level of trub however probably cost me a quarter of a bottle of beer from a 3 gallon brew over the courser crush. In the end it was a wash. Grain cost is the least of your expenses. Do you care if you have to buy an ounce or two more grain to hit the desired ABV? Do you really care if you have 5.9% or 6%? The game is about making good beer, not about achieving benchmarks.
RO water is NOT the way to start out if you have decent local water, but may be your only option...... Why take everything out and then add it back? If your local water is crap, then think about buying bottled non-ro water to start. You don't want chlorine, but it's fairly easy to remove. Building your own water from RO is a last resort, an extra unnecessary step. If your local water worked well for extract brewing, it should work well for all grain, provided the PH is within range and it has no chlorine. Inexpensive campden tablets available from your LHBS store will do job fine........ boiling will also. A little googling will turn up lots of info on this.

There is no better way to discourage someone from brewing than to introduce lots of complexity into what is a truly simple endeavor.

I would also STRONGLY suggest buying a couple of corny kegs early on. The cost will seem trivial compared to the labor of cleaning and sanitizing bottles. I resorted to the mini kegs that Williams Brewing sells, and some paint ball bottles for CO2....... the kegs fit in the fridge easily, and I charged my kegs periodically instead of leaving them on the bottle in the end. You will never regret doing it. But you have to reach "bottle burnout" first ;-)

............. disclaimer: I no longer brew. I had to quit brewing and mostly quit drinking for health reasons, but I've brewed in the neighborhood of 200 brews.

H.W.

 

[deadwolfbones]

I've been doing 3gal batches in a 6gal kettle. Works great. With pre-crushed grain, assuming a single crush, I put it in a freezer bag and pound it on a hard surface with a rubber mallet to double-crush. My efficiency is around 78%, so I've actually had to scale some generic AG recipes down, not up.

(Just found an online supply store that does double crush for free, though, so hopefully the mallet is a thing of the past.)

 

[PADave]

Correction: Ro water would be local, just with the local removed.

IMHO, unless you're trying to simulate the exact water profile of a geographic location specific to a particular style, i.e. Bavarian hefeweizen, ordinary good-tasting tap water (treated with metabisulphite to remove chloramine) will produce perfectly good beers. Well, so long as your mash pH isn't out of whack. In other words, don't burn your house down just because the gutters need a cleaning.

Water chemistry, like nearly every aspect of this hobby, is something you can choose to either gloss over (as most do) or become needlessly obsessed with. But if you find yourself with an excess of time, patience, and money, by all means dive right in. I'm looking at you LODO-divas, home-maltsters, hop growers, and full-automation guys; lots of fun to be had but wholly unnecessary.

In my experience there are lots of cheaper, easier, and more fool-proof ways such as dialing in your process and perfecting your recipes that will produce real, tangible improvements in your beer.

I use to be in this school of thought till I realized that i couldn't make a dark beer. The water I was using made a good IPA, but dark brews never came out right. Learned a little about water chemistry, started building my own water, and my beers have improved a lot. Not all water is the same, and not all water will make good beer.

 

[balrog]

@GPa Bob , 10G kettle with Wilser bag will be great for 5G batches, I've used that for nearly 100 brews. @RM-MN is right about the 8-11# grain, 7 gallons being typical. @Owly055 has a valid point about crush. I've bought double crush for a long time from Ritebrew and everything was very consistent brew to brew for efficiency. I recently went with a Corona mill and I'm still finding efficiency differences (wheat malt crushes differently due to size or general orneriness) but 4-6 gravity points is all I'm seeing.

But your kit will be great, with a bag, for 5G batches. And AG means you get to try all manner and kind of interesting combinations.