First all-grain BIAB success

[thesemicullen]

I did my first all-grain BIAB brew on my birthday Jan. 3. It was AHS's smoked porter kit. The only divergence was that used two packs of US-05.

My last two batches were partial mash BIAB and because of how well those brew days went, I decided to step up to all-grain. While the entire day was a success, it's not to say that I didn't learn a thing or two along the way.

I bought a 10-gallon pot for this brew, upgrading from a 7.5-gallon. I learned that my flat-top stove boils a full 10 gallons just fine, so I decided to brew in my kitchen rather than using my propane burner. I planned to dunk sparge, so I intended to mash in 4 gallons and sparge in 3. That was the goal.

The first hiccup of the day came when I began to heat up my strike water in the 10-gallon pot. I kept looking at the pot, at my bag, and at that big bag of grain on the counter. I had some doubts that my bag was going to be big enough for the grains to get down into the water. Turns out, I was right.

So, I wound up switching to my 7.5-gallon pot for the mash. It worked just fine, but switching pots in the middle of the process was a bit jarring and a tad messy.

After 60 minutes, I transferred the wort to the 10-gallon pot, set the grain bag in strainer over the pot to drain, and then used my 7.5-gallon pot again for the sparge. I had heated up 3 gallons of water in another pot.

Sparged for 10 minutes (ish) dunking the bag in the water, then put the bag back into the strainer and poured the sparge water over the bag using a 4-cup measuring cup to dunk and pour.

The projected OG for this recipe was 1.065. I got their "1% alcohol boost" Brewvint pack and wound up with an OG of 1.072. I'm pretty happy with that result.

I know that I would not have had any kind of success were it not for copiously studying what folks here have done. So, thank you all for your posts!

Lessons learned: 1. Next batch will probably be a lower gravity beer. 2. I will probably go ahead and brew outside on my propane burner because it was just too messy for the kitchen. 3. I may attempt to put in some kind of a pulley system to raise the bag like I have seen from some folks here. 4. Have backup pots, supplies. etc. cleaned and ready to go, just in case.

Otherwise, I'm going to work on brewing more beer and increasing my efficiency.

 

[RM-MN]

I have a thought experiment for you. Sparging is just dissolving the sugars left in the grains so you can collect them instead of throwing them out, right? I want you to imagine (or you can do the whole thing, no waste invloved) brewing a cup of tea. Now you decided that you wanted your tea a little bit sweet so you added sugar....and it went right to the bottom of the cup and stayed there. Bummer, you think, so you grab a spoon and stirred the tea until the sugar was dissolved. With me so far? Now, how long did you stir to dissolve the sugar, 30 seconds, a minute, 10 minutes? If you stirred for 10 minutes you got all the sugar to dissolve but in the meanwhile your tea got cold. I'll bet you only stirred for 30 seconds because that got almost all the sugar dissolved. Don't you think that you could dissolve the sugars from that bunch of grains in less than 10 minutes too?

Wilserbrewer, one of the contributors on here, makes custom bags for doing BIAB. His reputation is good and he can make you a custom fit bag for your 10 gallon pot. It will be worth it.

 

[thesemicullen]

There's no killin' like overkillin', I s'pose.

I see where you're coming from, and still being relatively new to brewing and brand spakin' new to all grain, I have a lot to learn.

Essentially, I was aping a process I read here in a post by Deathbrewer about partial mash brewing that I've used to great success in the past. But yeah, you make perfect sense.

Edit: And I've already been coveting Wilserbrewer's bags. Something for the future.

 

[tooblue02]

Just got the bag and pulley set up, best 30 bucks I ever spent.