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Dtsyukfan

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Joined
Jun 28, 2020
Messages
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Location
Columbiaville, MI
I jumped into the beer hobby with both feet. I bought an all-grain bourbon vanilla porter kit from Box brew kits. Brew day went well. I was conscientious about sanitization, laid out everything I needed ahead of time in the order I would need it. Maintaining my mash temp was a trick, and I had blisters on my stir hand from trying to keep the temp steady. Next time I'll bring it to heat and insulate the kettle. The house smelled like chocolate. Sparging was easy, and my gf even made a couple loaves of bread from some of the spent grain. The rest went to the deer. Well, one deer, which ate the whole lot in one sitting. Better that than my strawberries. Or the beans. The boil was 60 minutes of non-issue. Only one very minor boil-over. Yeah, I turned my back. :rolleyes:
Target OG was 1.064. I measured 1.074 at 70 degrees. Target FG was1.009. I screwed up and added the priming sugar (1.5 tablespoons for a 1 gallon batch, according to Northern Brewer's priming calculator) before I took my final reading, which was 1.013. I don't know how to estimate the correct reading, but I think it's pretty close. I filled 8 bottles, plus what was nearly a bottle worth in my hydrometer tube ( I really need a thinner one ). Now the bottles are sitting in a 5 gallon bucket with a lid on, due to my ignorant arse over priming a cider bottle a few weeks ago and finding the shards a couple days later. I don't want to go down that path again.
The amount of trub robbed me of at least a bottle of liquid. I'm disappointed in that, and it's already pushing me toward finding a larger kettle to move to 5 gallon batches. It's just hard to swallow that initial cost. I tasted the beer in the test tube and got a rich, thick chocolatey taste with a definite warming feeling of alcohol, and I think it will mellow out well. Now the waiting game begins. It's going to be tough...
 
Thank you. I actually used a brew bag, and I was surprised at the amount of stuff that still made it into the wort. Nothing solid, of course, just gelatinous stuff I assumed was from the grain starches, as there wasn't any real substance left in the spent grain. It was little more than empty hulls.
 
About 75-80% of the grist weight is normally dissolved (extracted) during mashing. With BIAB that may be even higher since there's no wort clarification.
 
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