Hit my gravity with the stove and a bucket

[nanofreak]

So last night I did a Janets Pale Ale partial mash.

First I brought 2 gallons of water up to my temp, and tossed in my grains. It came in just above the 150 I wanted to be at, so I added a little more cool water to bring it down.

I covered the pot, occasionally measured the temp, and adjusted the burner to keep it at 150 as needed.

I heated sparge water to 170.

I lined a bottle bucket with a grain bag, and dumped in my mash after just over an hour at being at 150.

I placed my kettle under the faucet for the bottle bucket aiming down into yet another finer grain bag that was clipped to my kettle, and drained slowly into that. Occasionally I would add more sparge water for a total of 2 more full gallons.

I ended up hitting 75% efficency with this. Not bad for using a stove and a bucket. I boiled witht this for my first 45, and added my extract with 15 minutes remaining. I am really looking forward to this beer.

 

[plaidpaint]

Thank you nanofreak, you've just made my life way easier

My grain bag is slightly too small to hold enough grain for a 5 gallon batch. I had been making 2.5 gallon batches, which it worked great for, but I decided to save myself some work and make larger ones. Turns out I just made a densely packed bag of wet grain, and my efficency was abysmal.

For some reason I never made the paradigm shift of just mashing the grain loose in the stock pot, then straining it out with the grain bag.

 

[nanofreak]

I have a "sparging bag" that fits in the bucket, but the holes in the bottom were big enough that I was getting small grain particles. I took a clip, and clipped a grain bag to the side of my kettle. I opened the valve on the bottle bucket real small to get just a little flow, that went through that grain bag. It worked perfect!