First BIAB Brew Day Today

[JBruchwalski]

I am getting ready to brew up a Cream Ale for the first time. This will be my first All grain brew and I will be using BIAB so I am rather nervous. This is also my first time brewing outside with a burner so I am making a few jumps on this brew day which is why I came to all your experienced brewers! I have done some decent amount of research on it but I just wanted to ask if there is anything that may help me so I don't completely jack up this beer.

Any and all advice would be appreciated! This beer is for my house warming party since the SWMBO and myself are buying a house and closing at the end of May.

 

[johnodon]

Have fun!

Let's see the recipe and some details about your equipment.

John

 

[NeoBrew]

Where to start?

-Accurate thermometer is a must.
-Crush has a big effect on efficiency, but for you first brew just go for it and see what you get.
-If you decide to heat during the mash, go very very slow and stir the whole time.
-Understand the SG of the wort after withdrawing the bag will naturally be lower than target OG because you haven't boiled off yet. (Simple but it threw me off at first.)
-DME is your friend if you efficiency is low. Have some on hand to boos gravity.
-I've taken to doing dunk sparges, my efficiency goes up 10-20% by doing it.
-Use Whirlflock. There is a lot of fines in the wort. Whirlflock and a couple hours of settling in the kettle after cooling will remove almost all of it. (Many people say just put it in the fermenter and it doesn't matter. I don't know the truth, but I feel better when my wort is clear to start.)

Have fun!

 

[BigFloyd]

If you can rig it, a pulley to lift and hold the grain bag over the kettle is very nice.

I also bought two 5 gallon food grade buckets at Lowes for $4 each. One has a bunch of 3/4" holes drilled in the bottom and lower sides. It sits inside the other bucket. After draining, I put the grain bag in there and press down with a cooking pan lid. It lets me squeeze dat bag like it owes me money.

I also use Whirlfloc and give it a chance to settle after chilling, although I find that 20 min is all you really need.

 

[johnodon]

Take temp and volume measurements and keep notes!!!

Getting to know your equipment will help you understand and improve your process. Take volume measurements at different times to understand grain absorption rate, boil-off rate, how well kettle holds temps during the mash, etc. In the end, the better you understand your equipment the more success you will have at producing consistent results.

John

 

[JBruchwalski]

It is Warthog Cream Ale Clone

9 Lbs two row
.5 Lbs 40L

.7 oz willamette (5% Alpha) 60 min
.44 oz centennial (9 Alpha) 3 Min.

WLP007 Dry English Ale


***directions (90 Min Boil)***

Mash for 45 minutes @ 151
Add water to 6.5 Gal
Start boil and add hops on schedule.


I have started so I hope it works. Only problem is I don't have my DME. The LHBS was closed when I started.


:fingers crossed:

 

[JBruchwalski]

I have Irish moss. Is that the same as whirlfloc? I have a new wort chiller that I am hoping will work to cool it a good bit and then I have to set it inside for a little to allow it to cool the rest of the way since it is 80+ right now outside.

I also bought a fairly large strainer that I set on top of the brew pot to keep the grain in until it drained. I am in the process right now of waiting for it to come to a boil and I am hoping it turns out okay.

 

[johnodon]

I have Irish moss. Is that the same as whirlfloc?

Yes.

You say it is your first BIAB. By that can we assume you have brewed before (extract)?

John

 

[JBruchwalski]

Yes. I have brewed 8-10 extracts the guys at my LHBS said I had enough knowledge to get into all grain and I didn't want to make the huge jump into the mash tun and all so I started with BIAB in hopes I can still make a good (hopefully better than extract) beer.

 

[johnodon]

OK...so you know most of the basics then.

I did one extract and then jumped into full blown AG (converted cooler --> mash tun, etc.). I then discovered BIAB and wish I would have found it sooner.

John

 

[JBruchwalski]

Yes. I believe I do. I have read through a few of the basic books and I read and reread the joy of Homebrewing all grain section.

My big problem that I need to still figure out is brewing efficiency and how I come up with it.

 

[johnodon]

Yes. I believe I do. I have read through a few of the basic books and I read and reread the joy of Homebrewing all grain section.

My big problem that I need to still figure out is brewing efficiency and how I come up with it.

A common mistake. Don't get hung up on efficiency. It is all about consistency!

All higher efficiency means is that you can use less grains to achieve the same OG (really just saving you $$$). It is far more important that you can achieve consistent brewhouse efficiency. If you can consistently achieve 75% (just to use a #), that means you know exactly how much grain you need for your next recipe to achieve the desired OG.

John

 

[Cider123]

Go to biabrewer.info and learn how to use the free biabacus program.

I have been using it for over a year now and have never, NEVER, come up short on my expected OG. It is spot on every time. So, if you know what your expected OG should be based on your recipe, then add the amounts of water and ingredients the biabacus tells you to, and you nail that OG every time. Who in the hell cares about measuring efficiency?
BTW, I use a 15 gallon pot for 5 gallon batches so I don't need to sparge and use all the strike water for mashing. This is more efficient than sparging (just kicked the beehive).
Have fun.

 

[TrojanAnteater]

BIAB is great.

I usually use a slightly thinner mash than what is usually recommended. It's just easier when it's slightly thinner. Usually the standard is ~1.3 quarts per pound of grain. I like to do about 1.5. After pulling the bag out of the mash tun and letting drain for a few, I sparge by dunking the grain bag into the remaining volume of water needed which has been heated to about 170 in another large kettle. I let it sit there for about 15 minutes while stirring to try and leach out as much sugar as I can. While the sparge is sitting I've started to heat the first runnings from the mash on the burner, then I add the sparge to that and bring it up to a boil. Get a gravity reading at this point so you know what your pre-boil gravity is.

Two things I've noticed are very important in hitting your numbers (I use Beersmith to formulate my recipes/volumes etc)

1. Find your mash efficiency as soon as possible. You can set it to 70'ish and if you are a little higher or lower it won't mess up your beer much at all (assuming you don't do anything else to try and correct it), but knowing the mash efficiency really gets you set up for the boil right where you should be.

2. Determine your boil off rate. You may have hit your numbers right on after the mash+sparge, but if you boil off a lot more or less than you predicted, then your ABV and possibly flavor will be off, because your volume of wort, and then beer, is off.

Of course, there are ways to correct for these during the brewing process if you measure you are off (through measuring gravities at different time), but if you know those couple things pretty accurately you don't have to worry as much.

I bet you will notice a great difference in this batch of all-grain beer compared to what you were doing with extract. (not that one can't brew very solid beers with extract, it's just most people who have just started brewing don't)

 

[Brewcycle69]

If you haven't, talk to your LHBS about double crushing your grains, BIAB method can use a finer crush which will give you a better efficiency; although I agree consistency is king. Regarding mash tuns etc.; BIAB is going to brew as good a beer as possible, adding an HLT and MLT won't allow you to brew anything better than you can brew now. From what you have now its all process, technique, recipes, and fermentation. But get a pump.

Cheers

 

[JBruchwalski]

What pump do you recommend?

I have finished y boil and I am waiting for the wort to cool to the proper temperature. My hose water was pretty warm due to warm temperatures so I could get it quiet low enough I am letting it cool a bit in the house.

From my readings I am off a little. I was trying to hit 1.040 and I came up with 1.037. Not sure if that is bad for a first time all grain brew. I am definitely going to go on that site and read up to see what I can fix and do a little better to really get myself moving with all grain. I already enjoy it more than extract brewing. I still have a brewers best chocolate milk stout extract kit I need to brew so I still have 1 more extract brew days.

 

[JBruchwalski]

One other thing I'm having a problem with is the bag. How do I go about getting the bits and pieces out of my grain bag with less hassle?

 

[soccerdad]

Washing machine. I use oxy free rather than Tide when I was grain and hops bags

 

[JBruchwalski]

Sorry, this was a repost.

 

[JBruchwalski]

As I was transferring the wort from the brew pot to the fermenter I was off a little in gravity but I also noticed that I only had about 4 gallons of wort so does this means that my efficiency is way off since I only had 4 gal and I still didn't hit my gravity?

 

[Brewcycle69]

Yep, your gravity was off a bit.

First thing to work on is your grain crush; most of the time this is the biggest issue. Next time double crush your grains, you'll come out much better.

Missing the volume is a problem as well, you need to add more water, but more importantly it would be good to understand where you missed the water calculation. Unfortunately that's just a matter of working back through your calculations.

I'll second the recommendation to get BeerSmith as well. There are a couple of free on-line recipe tools you can look at as well, they do help. I hope you weren't thinking everything would go perfect first time; you'll need to screw it up and fix it like everyone else had to. Actually, not bad for the first run through, it takes a few brews to get your all grain system dialed in the first time.

What pump do you recommend?

Regarding the pump, many BIAB'ers use it to constantly recirculate during the mash, which does two things:

1. Helps increase efficiency by continually "washing" the grains.
2. Works great at stabilizing the mash temperature.

As you measure your mash temperature you'll find that it can vary 2 or 3 degrees from one side of the kettle to the other. Constantly recirculating the wort during the mash provides a completely consistent mash temperature throughout. A pump can be a down the road upgrade but very useful.

Let us know how it goes.

Cheers

 

[Brewcycle69]

Whooops. What pump NOT Why a pump. I use a March pump, Chugger pumps are great as well.

 

[JBruchwalski]

I didn't think I had to do any water calculations since the recipe told me how much water to mash in and how much to add afterwards. It makes little sense to me because I had added more water to mash in so that I could get a temperature reading (my LHBS said to mash in 5 gal vs the 3 gal suggested on the recipe because my thermometer probe was higher than the water level with grains in it). I also added the extra gallon and a half as suggested after my mash. This brought me to roughly 6.5 gallons (possibly a half gallon more as my boil off was pretty high). I was not expecting it to be perfect or anywhere close to perfect.

I am rather impressed though at how I did for first all grain. The re circulation is really screwing me up. Why would you recirculate the wort back into the grain if the grain is already in the water? Maybe I am misunderstanding you or the actual process. Is it basically just for temperature control?

Where do you buy your pumps at? My LHBS prices are rather high for pumps

 

[RM-MN]

One other thing I'm having a problem with is the bag. How do I go about getting the bits and pieces out of my grain bag with less hassle?

I don't worry about the little bits and pieces. The little pieces have already given up their goodness and the next thing I'm going to put in that bag is little bits and pieces of grain. Just make sure to rinse the bag to get the residual sugar out of it and hang it to dry.

 

[RM-MN]

I didn't think I had to do any water calculations since the recipe told me how much water to mash in and how much to add afterwards. It makes little sense to me because I had added more water to mash in so that I could get a temperature reading (my LHBS said to mash in 5 gal vs the 3 gal suggested on the recipe because my thermometer probe was higher than the water level with grains in it). I also added the extra gallon and a half as suggested after my mash. This brought me to roughly 6.5 gallons (possibly a half gallon more as my boil off was pretty high). I was not expecting it to be perfect or anywhere close to perfect.

I am rather impressed though at how I did for first all grain. The re circulation is really screwing me up. Why would you recirculate the wort back into the grain if the grain is already in the water? Maybe I am misunderstanding you or the actual process. Is it basically just for temperature control?

Where do you buy your pumps at? My LHBS prices are rather high for pumps

The recipe told you how much water to use for a conventional mash tun. BIAB is not the same. I have a 7 1/2 gallon pot so I start with about 6 1/2 gallons of water because if I use more the pot will run over when I add the grains.

As someone else mentioned above, crush is everything in getting efficiency in all grain but crush is a compromise. With a conventional mash tun, you won't be able to get it to drain if your crush is too tight so you give up efficiency to gain the ability to drain the tun. With that compromise comes the need to mash longer. You can't convert the starches to sugars if the grain isn't wet and with a bigger grain particle it takes longer to wet through and to leach the converted sugars back out. With BIAB, you eliminate the problem of getting the tun drained by having the grain in a bag that you can squeeze the wort out of and if your grain is crushed fine you don't have to mash for a full hour, half an hour will easily get the conversion. Along with shortening the mash period, the temperature drop problem goes away too so you don't need to add heat or circulate with a pump. Throw a sleeping bag over the pot and you're good.

You don't need to boil off a lot of the water. Control your heat until you have a slow rolling boil and you won't lose as much water. You also don't need a 90 minute boil for most beers. 60 is plenty to extract the bitterness from the hops and boil off the DMS precursors unless you are using lots of Pilsner malt in which case you may need more boiling time.

 

[TrojanAnteater]

As I was transferring the wort from the brew pot to the fermenter I was off a little in gravity but I also noticed that I only had about 4 gallons of wort so does this means that my efficiency is way off since I only had 4 gal and I still didn't hit my gravity?

Since you didn't hit your expected gravity, all this means is that your efficiency was less than what you approximated it to be when calculating the recipe. Re-read the definition of efficiency... and think about it until you really understand it and the variables that affect it. It's all about how much of the sugars are you getting out of the grain's maximum amount of sugar. If you get 80% of what the total amount is held in the grain your mash efficiency is 80%. You won't get 100% efficiency, nor do you want that (taste will suffer). If say you set your efficiency at 80% while formulating your recipe in some kind of software, and you still come out below what you expect on your pre-boil gravity, then your efficiency was actually lower than 80%.

How was your volume at the start of the boil? Were you right on? If so it sounds like you just had too high of a boil off rate (your boil doesn't need to be crazy vigerous, it just needs to have a slight rolling boil), or you left a lot of sludge in the kettle after you cooled it down and transferred to the fermenter.
--There are a lot of places you lose volume throughout the process. Grain absorption during mashing, boil off, shrinking during wort chilling, amount left in the boil kettle when transferring to the fermenter, and amount left back in the fermenter at bottling stage..... Beersmith is good because even if you don't tweek these numbers for your recipe, it still does a pretty good job of approximating them.

 

[Cider123]

One of the things that I was dumfounded by when I began AG brewing (and I only know BIAB AG) is how much water I really needed for a moderate OG, 5 gallon batch of beer. It is a lot more than I thought. Since I wanted to mash in the full amount of strike water and not use a sparge method, that meant I needed a larger pot. I owned a 10 gallon pot for about 2 weeks, then sold it on craigslist and bought a 15 gallon.

For example, I made Biermuncher's Centennial Blonde yesterday. Now I upped the OG a slight bit to 1.046. In the BIABacus, it tells me to use close to 9 pounds of grain and 8.3 gallons of strike water to get 5.3 gallons of wort into my fermentor at 1.046. As always, when I'm done mashing, squeezing the bag a bit, 69 min boil, chill and dump into the fermenter, I have exactly what was expected. I can't ask for more.
I used to collect the pre-boil volume, the pre-boil gravity and all the data along the way to fill in the BIABacus chart and get my various efficiency measurements. Over time I stopped bothering with all those calculations because I found it to be a waste of my time. The BIABacus gives me the final volume and OG that I want every time so calculating all that data is , as they say in baseball, just record keeping. If I had an issue, then I would use such data to find out what was going wrong. I spend more time on the ingredients now to work more on flavor and mouthfeel than getting the wort gravity and volume correct.

 

[JBruchwalski]

Recipe called for 12 Qts of mash water I believe. My problem with that was my thermometer was still out of the water with the grain in it so I added up to 5 gallons of water in order to fully cover the thermometer probe. It then called to gather 5 gallons of wort (was unsure of how I should've done that if I had used the suggested water) and add a gallon and a half more water bringing the total water to 6.5 gallons. I then started up the best to get it boiling. I didn't think much about the boiloff until about an hour in which is when I turned it down. Obviously that was a bit too late but I will most definitely check my boil more often now.

My LHBS did double mill the grain. I'm not sure if they had changed the settings or not (do they need to?). The guy who was helping me is a BIAB brewer as well and advised me that the double mill would help.

Also, I had completely forgot to take my gravity readings throughout so that was a huge foul on my part. I know it'd be hard to give a definite answer because there's so many variables but what could've been wrong? Was it just my boil off was too high or could it have been that I had too much strike water? What do y'all suggest for BIAB strike (how much water per Lbs of grain?)

 

[Foosier]

taking gravity is not a huge foul. Honestly, there are very few huge fouls out there. Just know we all do things a bit different. That is one of the most important things to know when reading this site. Everyone has little differences and tweaks that work for them. Read up on them, try them out (or don't) to develop the technique / process that works for you.

Personally I do full volume mash BIAB in a 10 gallon pot. No sparge step. No recirculation. It works for me.

To answer your question on strike water, I use this formula...

Batch volume + absorption loss + boil off loss + trub loss = Mash water volume

For example 5.5 gals of beer + .6 gal grain absorption + 1.2 gal boil off + .5 gal trub loss = 7.8 gal of water needed.

Check out the "Simplebiabcalculator" on line. it does all the math for you. Works pretty well and it is free!

 

[JBruchwalski]

Is that .6 gal absorption per pound of grain?