First BIAB Complete

[twah]

I completed my first BIAB brew today with my newly built BIAB brew cart with grain bag crane. I attached a pic of it. The cart worked well.

Everything went pretty well. Mash held pretty good between 152-154, I was constantly monitoring every 5-10 min and if it was getting low, I turned on the heat for a little bit and got it back up a couple of degrees. I know it's not the best way to do it but I haven't gotten the insulation done for my brew kettle. But I needed to refill my empty keg so I just wanted to get something brewing. I need to fix my small kegarator anyway so in that time, the new brew will age and I'll be able to empty my other keg and fix the fridge and the new brew will be aged. Anyway, if all my pre-boil SG measurements are accurate, BeerSmith says i got about 66.7% efficiency, which I don't think is too bad for my first ever all grain brew doing a BIAB batch.

Few hours after pouring in my yeast starter, it's burping away so all in all, it was a great learning experience for my first BIAB. I'll find out how it really turned out in about 8 weeks...

 

[wilserbrewer]

Nice rig, is the second kettle for sparging the bag, or double batching, or both???

 

[RM-MN]

Nice rig. My back would appreciate that crane to lift and hold the bag.

Since you are BIAB, your grains can be crushed very fine and if you have them crushed fine enough, conversion of the starches to sugars happens really quickly so you don't have to worry about heat loss in the mash kettle. Your conversion will be all done in less than 30 minutes and if you are using nearly the full volume of water (small sparge amount) the heat loss will be less than 2 degrees, even without insulating your kettle.

 

[twah]

Thanks! Not bad for not having jigs to square everything up, I did pretty well on it. Learned a lot about metal fab. I don't have a crusher yet so I had Northern brewer crush them for me. A crusher is next on my list though. I have read about the finer crushing so when I get a crusher I will remember to do that.

The crane is awesome! Northern tool $15 for the 600lb hand winch. The 1" 11ga 10' round tube was about $13 from metal supermarkets and I just welded it up. The crane is so freaking nice. Just crank it and it locks in place and it just drains away. I did a partial mash and it wore me out trying to hold the grains so that's when I started to read a lot about people's set ups and thought about that. It swivels back and forth so it can service both sides and I'm going to make a spreader bar to help lift the other side if there is a pot on it. Or to possibly lift a pot of water if I end up making something else to help support the handles on the pot, some type of cradle, not sure yet.

The right side is for a HLT (I have a smaller 5 gal pot) I could then cascade it over to the mash tun and then trickle that down to my kettle on the right. I tried to build it out for future growth if I ever do a HLT and Mash tun. But we'll see how well my BIAB adventures go first. I might just stay doing BIAB because it's so much easier for time sake and clean up.

 

[twah]

I never thought about doing double batches on it... Hmmm thanks for the tip. I could get one mashed then boiling then start mashing on another on. Just don't know if I could handle all that lifting in a day, the beer and equipment gets heavy after awhile. Plus have to fined a place to store two fermenters lol. But a definite possibility. Gotta find a brew buddy for that! Haha

 

[wilserbrewer]

I never thought about doing double batches on it... Hmmm thanks for the tip. I could get one mashed then boiling then start mashing on another on.

My thoughts were you have two burners and two pots...in theory you could do two batches at the same time...maybe stagger by 10-15 minutes for logistics of course....cheers!

 

[twah]

Yes that is a grand possibility. I could do that. Get a few BIABs under my belt and I may try that. Thanks for complicating my brew life a little Hahahaha.