First brew in secondary any tips?

[GorillaMedic]

First time brewing, with another guy who's done it a few times before a couple years ago. We brewed a pretty simple single malt/single hop IPA recipe with an all-grain method. Our mash efficiency was terrible (54% calculated), in part due to not having our strike temperature high enough and then struggling to raise the temperature by adding hot water. We initially mashed in with 8 gallons and had a mash temp of 135º for about 30 minutes, then increased it to 153º by adding more hot water; about 13 minutes later, increased it to 162º and held for 10 minutes. Used a large rectangular cooler as our Mash tun.

Vorloft, then batch sparged, and then boil. Boiled for 90 minutes, hopped per recipe.

Ran into issues chilling using a Therminator plate chiller which clogged twice, I guess with hop material? Also didn't have enough ice. We ended up getting our ~10 gallon batch down to about 90º, then transferred to my chest freezer fermentation chamber, and waited to pitch yeast until it cooled to 68º (about 4–5 hrs later).

SG at this point was 1.052 (measured with refractometer)

Fermentation didn't start until 12–15 hrs, which had me worried. It did blow off one airlock and almost blew the second one.

After seven days, fermentation activity appeared to have stopped and a hydrometer reading was 1.014. Transferred to secondary using a siphon and dry hopped.

Since then, it's developed some foam on top, but has minimal activity in the airlock. Looking forward to bottling in a couple weeks and tasting it in a month or so.

A few things we learned:

• We need to preheat the mash tun, and use higher strike temperatures to hit our target mash temp.
• Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I felt like we could be more thorough in sanitization.
• Definitely need a filter before running wort into plate chiller. And need more hoses in general.
• We didn't aerate the wort much at all; going to try oxygenation next time.
• A blow-off hose would've saved me a lot of cleanup time.
• Our mash tun valve/bazooka screen fitting/lack of sparge setup made things unnecessarily complicated. We're building a new mash tun.

Any other observations/thoughts/ideas for how we can improve our beer?

I'll update when we can actually taste the finished product. A taste of the beer when it finished primary was pretty promising; no off flavors and overall pretty good.

 

[user 204491]

Honestly that all sounds pretty reasonable for your first time out, so don't worry about it too much. It seems that you got wort into the fermenter, and that wort is transforming into beer, so you're doing A-OK!

One thing I would recommend (your lessons learned are all very good lessons), is to skip the secondary next time. It's not needed at all for these types of beers, and you're taking the chance to do more harm (oxidation, infection) than you are good (getting it off the trub). Just dry hop in your primary, and you will be fine.

 

[Francus]

I agree fully with skipping the secondary. There really is no need.

I had a plate chiller for a long time and finally got rid of it as they tend to clog. You can put a bazooka screen on the boil kettle and that helps with leaf hops, but some pellet hops and trub will make its way into the filter and not ever get out. Sooner or later it will develop a clog and getting out those clogs takes time and effort. I ultimately went to a counterflow wort chiller with an ice bath prechiller.

As for mash tun, if you don't use a RIMs or HERMs system then the Igloo type mash tuns work great and can hold the temperature within a degree or two for hours. More than enough time for a normal mash. There are plenty of strike temperature calculators online to help you get the mash temp perfect. I have done it this with a bazooka screen and with a false bottom. In general I have found a true false bottom works better and gets better efficiency. But they cost a lot more.

For mashing I have found that 1.25 quarts per pound of grain works well. Lately I have started using 1.75 quarts per pound and my efficiency increased a bit. I have also started underletting on my mash and it produces many fewer dough balls. If you don't have a pump then gravity feeding would have to be used. Then again, I just poured in the strike water on top for over 25 years and somehow I still made good beer.

Sanitation is very important. But I've heard all sorts of different ways. I usually use Iodophor and I've never had a problem. I have a spray bottle full of vodka for quick touch ups like fermentation locks. Don't use rubbing alcohol as it is denatured and poisonous.

Other than that, like a lot in brewing if you ask 10 people you'll get 10 different answers and most of them will work just fine.

Just remember the goal of the brewer is to make brewing process as expensive and complicated as your wallet and spouse will allow.

 

[theseeker4]

To add to the above, you might be dry hopping too long. Dry hopping more than a week can sometimes result in grassy flavors to the beer. To be safe, I would bottle this batch after 7 days on the dry hops.

Also, I agree with the above, ditch the secondary unless bulk aging for a long period, or adding fruit or oak or something like that. Dry hopping in primary is perfectly fine.