I Finally Took the BIAB Plunge

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bigbeck81

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So I've been homebrewing for a little over 4 years now and had only done extract batches until this past Labor Day weekend. I've wanted to switch to all-grain for some time and thought that going the BIAB route was a nice transition. Overall, I think it was a success and I'm kicking myself for not taking pictures, as I see so many of you who have also taken the plunge have. Here's a breakdown of how my brew day went:

I brewed on Sunday so I could allow myself the luxury of drinking on Sunday without worrying about Monday morning at work. It was a beautiful day in Northern VA and my buddy was there to watch and drink with me. I decided to go with a no-sparge BIAB, using my 10 gallon kettle to brew up Reno's well-known and often-brewed Punkin Ale clone. I was confused as to whether or not I should count the pumpkin as part of the grain bill. I decided not to and measured my water based on the 12 pounds of grain. My brew kettle hardly had any room to spare after adding the pumpkin and grain.

I heated my strike water up to 163 and after doughing in, the temp only dropped to 159 and I was looking to hit 156. Perhaps more stirring next time will help get that temp down. I also thought it wasn't a big deal since I'd lose some temp during the 60 minute mash and it would probably spend the majority of the time at 156. Nope - my kettle held the temp of 159 the entire 60 minutes - which is great to know it can hold temps like that, but not so great when trying to hit an exact mash temp.

I'm pretty sure I lost some precious wort when it was time to drain the bag after the mash. My plan was to place a wire rack on the top of my kettle and let it drain for 10-20 minutes and then squeeze the hell out of it. I wasn't prepared for how wide the bottom of the bag was going to be when taking it out of the kettle. Now I know that I'll have to adjust the way I take the bag o' grains out going forward. I also know that I'll have to get some gloves to use when handling the wet, hot bag of sweetness.

Beersmith predicted the pre-boil gravity to be 1.050 and I was off at 1.044. This had me a bit dejected since I thought I did everything "by the book" up to this point (including not getting too drunk too quick). But I pushed on and boiled the wort for an hour, adding hops and brown sugar and pumpkin pie spice at various times. I underestimated the boil-off (or I lost too much wort/didn't squeeze enough during the draining of the bag) since I ended up with 5 gallons instead of the 5.5 I wanted to put in the fermentor. With the wort cooled and aerated, I took the OG before tossing some yeast in there and hit 1.060. The Beersmith projected OG was 1.063 so I was pretty happy there. I woke up Monday morning to a healthy and strong fermentation.

Sorry for the long post - I am excited to have my first all-grain brew session in the books and I'm dying to get my next batch underway. :mug:
 
Congrats on the first brew! Don't worry yourself too much on missing by a few points here and there, in the end you'll still make beer!
 
Beersmith predicted the pre-boil gravity to be 1.050 and I was off at 1.044.

That was consistently my experience BIABing. I still don't know what the problem was, but I wonder if the Beersmith math for no-sparge is off.
 
I was doing no Sparge BIAB for awhile but the minimalist in me wanted to see how much sugar I could get out of the grain... I started doing calculated Mash volumes and "dunk sparging" in 170 degree water. I then put a colander over the brew pot and dump the sparge water over my grain bag. This may or may not help but it makes me feel like I've done what I can to rinse all sugars off.

Almost 2 years brewing and still no hydrometer ><
 
Like you I recently did my 1st BIAB and came up a little short hitting my marks. Biggest thing was you/we did it. Got through the first and will have decent beer. All in the learning process as we go. On to the next!

Smitty
 
If you put your numbers into beersmith, it should tell you what your efficiency was. Then scale your next recipe to use that efficiency.

Over a period of time, you will get an average efficiency that you use ever time.

But 1.060 vs. 1.063? ... that is right on the money.
 
Did you grind the grain yourself? How fine did you make it? I'm using a blender and producing flour. Eff now about 83%.
 
you're good. Measure and track results and in a batch or two you'll have repeatable results.

That's the "Holy Grail" of brewing.
 
That's the beauty of this hobby - I may not have been perfect in my brewing, but damn it, I made beer, and I did enough good things to make me come back and do it again!
 
The ability to adjust in Beersmith is one of the things that make it one of the most popular recipe building software programs.

Add your gravities and volumes to the program to figure out your efficiency. Then change the expected efficiency to follow. It will then change the amounts of the ingredients to the new expected efficiency and you should be close. It may take a couple of brews to fine tune your parameters. After that you will have a lot more consistency.
 
Are you using a copper fining like whirlfloc or irish moss to take out all that material?
How much kettle trub are you ending up with?

I do use Irish Moss, but because I'm using a 2 gallon bucket I can't spare any room in it for trub. so i filter going into the bucket using a paint strainer like the one below. They fit perfect into a 5 or 6.5 g bucket. I need to get at least 1.8=1.9 gallons into the bucket and leave a little head space.

[url=https://www.homebrewtalk.com/photo/paint-strainer-60936.html] [/URL]
 
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