Finished my first, tips for the second?

[Chemstudent]

Just had a taste of my first beer, made with the brooklyn brew IPA kit. It looked and tasted great and I'm glad everything turned out well. Now I'd like to move on to the next batch.

This first batch I made by mashing in the grains that the kit came with and then boiling the wort, adding hops, throwing in yeast, etc. The hard part came when I had to pour the grain liquid from one pot into another through a strainer and then pour more hot liquid over the spent grains. The process was time consuming, since my strainer was too small and the pots were large to handle. My question is, what would be the simplest and cheapest way to make the mashing process easier? I've read some about mash tuns or grain bags, but I don't want to spend too much extra money.

And while I'm on the subject, the batch I made was only one gallon and had me using a large part of my relatively large pots already. How will I be able to handle five gallons like I see many are doing?

Thanks in advance.

 

[wherestheyeast]

I've done one of Brooklyn's recipes and similar issues with straining & sparging. I since discovered BIAB (Brew In A Bag), which is a pretty simple way of brewing all-grain where all the water you will need/use for the batch is in one pot; you put a fine mesh bag in the pot and mash the grains in the bag, removing, draining $ squeezing the bag post-mash.

As far as 5gal batches? If you want to do full boil (enough water used to end up with 5gals into fermenter) you'll need a 7-8 gal min pot. Most 5-gal extract kits can be done in 3-4 gal pots with the remaining water added post-boil.

 

[mugzz819]

X2 on biab if your trying to keep things cheap and easy. I bought a turkey fryer kit for about $80 that came with a 32 qt pot, 10qt(I think) smaller pot and a burner that hooks up to a propane tank. I buy the paint strainer bags at home dept for a couple bucks and can do 5 gallon batches all grain with no problem.

I fill the big pot to about 5 or 6 inches to the top and heat that up for the mash, then put the bags in and then add my grains. I find wrapping a blanket or old winter coat around it keeps my mash within 2 or 3 degrees of temp for at least an hour. After I finish mashing I pull out the bag and let it drain for a minute or so (until I get tired of trying to hold it) then I put it in the smaller pot and pour some heated water (use one of my regular stockpots on the stove inside to heat to sparge temp) over it and let it soak for 5-10 minutes before draining again and adding that. Sometimes I repeat this process one more time to pretty much fill my brew kettle to the top. It's a little extra work but I'm able to get 5.5 gallons into the fermenter and average about 80% efficiency this way. and I only have to empty a bag of grain and clean 2 pots at the end of the day.

 

[user 98891]

I went the more traditional route by building a mash tun out of a 10 gallon cooler I bought at Lowes. I use that and a 15 gallon kettle. I heat the strike water in the kettle, mash in the cooler and use the kettle to heat my sparge water. I drain the runnings into a clean bucket. I recently got a second kettle so now I heat the strike and sparge water in that and run my wort to my boil kettle. The batch sparge method makes this process very quick and I have yet to be disappointed.