First AG Brew Tomorrow

[USMC_Brewer]

Tomorrow I am doing my first AG brew which is also my first brew ever. I will be using BIAB but I have some questions.

I am going to make Bee Cave Brewery Haus Pale Ale
and just wanted to make sure I am going to do this right.

First how much water do I need to put into the kettle to start with and what temperature should I get the water to before I add the grains? Also after an hour with the grains in do I take the temperature up to 170 for 10min?

Thanks for the help

 

[kapbrew13]

You planning to sparge or not? That will change the amount of water also.
My biab, this past weekend required around 9 gallons of water for a 6.5 gallon boil. I think you use 1.25-1.50 qt water per lb of grain.

 

[studmonk3y]

I do the aussie style no-sparge BIAB and I've made this recipe before. If you want to do a no sparge BIAB you add all the water you're going to use from the very beginning. So plug it into beersmith and see what your pre-boil volume needs to be and add more to account for grain absorption.
For example when I brewed this, I my batch size was 20L, giving me a boil volume of 26L. I used 4.05kg of grain and I've found when I pull the bag out to drain (I give it a little squeeze as well) I typically get about 0.5L/kg in grain absorption. So I added another 2L to account for that bring my total water volume to 28L.
So you can see your numbers will vary depending on batch size, boil off rate, grain absorption. If I were you, I'd ball park estimate all this amount for now but take detailed notes during the brew so you know your brewery's specifications.

 

[robcj]

First how much water do I need to put into the kettle to start with and what temperature should I get the water to before I add the grains? Also after an hour with the grains in do I take the temperature up to 170 for 10min?

Have you joined BIABrewer.info yet? Registration is inconvenient but they have some useful tools there, particularly a very comprehensive spreadsheet that calculates all of your volumes. I couldn't BIAB without it.