First All-Grain and All-Confused

[mgortel]

Bthorn....sounds like you hit your marks.....I brewed my first all grain this past Sunday myself and posted a live update of my session.....see below.....probably similar to your day...


https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/reporting-live-my-first-all-grain-batch-248346/

 

[JayB240]

Primary Fermentaion should just be starting.
Are you planning on transfer to Carboy after a week of Primary ?

Jay

 

[bthorn9435]

Fermentation was going this morning...pretty fast. I am using Nottingham on this one.
Jay I am going to do 2 weeks in primary then bottle. I have always had good results and
good beer this way.

 

[bthorn9435]

Ok after recovering from the hectic brew day I have went back and
reviewed a few things. I also have a couple of questions.
It appears the my effeciency was around 65%. I thought I nailed
everything procedure wise. Going back through my notes it appears I may
have misunderstood a step. When I put in the sparge water it was at 173
and this brought my mash back to 154. I rested for 10 min and drained. I am
thinking now I should have had the water much hotter to get the bed up to
170. Is this correct thinking? I thought 154 was a good temp all the way through
and that getting above 170 was bad. Please advise.

 

[JuanMoore]

Ok after recovering from the hectic brew day I have went back and
reviewed a few things. I also have a couple of questions.
It appears the my effeciency was around 65%. I thought I nailed
everything procedure wise. Going back through my notes it appears I may
have misunderstood a step. When I put in the sparge water it was at 173
and this brought my mash back to 154. I rested for 10 min and drained. I am
thinking now I should have had the water much hotter to get the bed up to
170. Is this correct thinking? I thought 154 was a good temp all the way through
and that getting above 170 was bad. Please advise.

Technically most people either add enough boiling water before the sparge to bring the grain bed up to 168-170F (called a mash-out), or use much hotter sparge water to raise the grain bed to around 168-170F. This step is important for fly sparging, but has little to no effect on efficiency for batch spargers. I have a HERMS system, and I double batch sparge with the water that's been keeping the hex coil warm, which is usually only a couple degrees warmer than the mash temp. Temps above 170F combined with a high PH can extract tannins, but with the proper PH and temps below 170F it's not much of a concern.

IMO crush and proper stirring of the mash are two of the biggest factors effecting efficiency. It sounds like you did a single batch sparge, and splitting the sparge volume in half and doing a double batch sparge will probably increase your efficiency some. I would caution against getting caught up chasing higher efficiencies. At the homebrew level consistency is more important than efficiency, and 65% really isn't that bad.