soboness5
Member
After a few weeks of MLT construction and purchasing some new equipment, I decided to brew my first all-grain recipe today (Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone). I did a ton of reading/research ahead-of-time, but as everyone knows, experience is the only way to learn.
Overall i'm pleased with the results, but things didn't go quite as smoothly as I had hoped.
We started off by pouring our spring water into the kettle, and used our 'calibrated' volume measuring stick to double-check. To our surprise (I brew with my buddy) it was measuring >4g even though we know we poured in exactly 3.5g from the bottles. After a quick conversation we decided to move ahead with the brew, and we'd re-calibrate the stick another day.
We mashed-in and ended up slightly below our 152 degree target. After adding a bit of near-boiling water (and neglecting to take-note of the volume added), we were spot-on temp-wise.
60-min. later I took the temp reading before vorlauf, and found that the temp had dropped to 149 over the hour. I had about three blankets on top of the cooler, but apparently that wasn't good enough...i'm going to have to try something else to insulate, or plan on adding some hot water at the 30 min mark from now on.
First runnings hit the expected volume of 2.2G pretty spot-on...the flow from the MLT was great. After sparging we took a measurement with our imperfect measuring device and concluded we had about 7G... .5 more than expected. First-glance at gravity was showing pretty close to the target after correcting for temp.
Boiled as-usual and ended up with about 6G after trub-loss and boil-off. Despite the higher volume, the gravity reading was 1.059 (after temp correction)...much higher than the 1.052 target. We had adjusted the original recipe to 65% efficiency from the 70% assumption...perhaps this wasn't necessary as it seems our mash efficiency wasn't bad.
Anyway...just wanted to give a quick recap and send a thank-you out to everyone for all the advice/info, as i'm sure today would've been much more painful without it!
CHEERS!
Overall i'm pleased with the results, but things didn't go quite as smoothly as I had hoped.
We started off by pouring our spring water into the kettle, and used our 'calibrated' volume measuring stick to double-check. To our surprise (I brew with my buddy) it was measuring >4g even though we know we poured in exactly 3.5g from the bottles. After a quick conversation we decided to move ahead with the brew, and we'd re-calibrate the stick another day.
We mashed-in and ended up slightly below our 152 degree target. After adding a bit of near-boiling water (and neglecting to take-note of the volume added), we were spot-on temp-wise.
60-min. later I took the temp reading before vorlauf, and found that the temp had dropped to 149 over the hour. I had about three blankets on top of the cooler, but apparently that wasn't good enough...i'm going to have to try something else to insulate, or plan on adding some hot water at the 30 min mark from now on.
First runnings hit the expected volume of 2.2G pretty spot-on...the flow from the MLT was great. After sparging we took a measurement with our imperfect measuring device and concluded we had about 7G... .5 more than expected. First-glance at gravity was showing pretty close to the target after correcting for temp.
Boiled as-usual and ended up with about 6G after trub-loss and boil-off. Despite the higher volume, the gravity reading was 1.059 (after temp correction)...much higher than the 1.052 target. We had adjusted the original recipe to 65% efficiency from the 70% assumption...perhaps this wasn't necessary as it seems our mash efficiency wasn't bad.
Anyway...just wanted to give a quick recap and send a thank-you out to everyone for all the advice/info, as i'm sure today would've been much more painful without it!
CHEERS!
