Is my process a bad idea?

[rigbyyard]

I am a new brewer, brewing this fall on my own for the first time. I've made three brews and a cider, and so far so good. I've made a few rookie mistakes like forgetting to correct the OG for temperature when adding makeup water to my first batch, and allow fermentation temps to get too high. Fortunately, what I have so far has come out pretty good. What the proprietor at my local shop says has so far proven true: its hard to make bad beer.

My third batch was the first I did without the benefit of a kit. It was more or less based on Denny Conn's vanilla bourbon porter, with changes necessitated by what I could get at my local shop and my equipment. I made the recipe partial mash through BeerSmith and used the following process. It seems to have worked great, which has me wondering why this isn't what more people do. Is there something I'm missing?

I brew in my kitchen on a gas stove that flows a lot of gas, so there's plenty of heat and the ability to control the heat very precisely. (Wife is a serious cook.) There is a hood about 24 inches above the cooktop, so there is a limit to how big a pot will fit. I use a 7 gallon lobster pot. I added four gallons of water and brought them up to mash temp, then added the bag (with a cookie grid to protect the bag from the burner) and the grains. Stirred periodically during the mash to ensure no scorching. After about 70 minutes, I removed the bag of grains to a bowl and took them to the sink. I put another cookie rack across another pot, put the bag on top, and used the faucet to rinse the grains. I got good dark water out of the grains, and poured it off into the first pot. I did that three times, and was still getting dark, sweet water out of the grains when the pot was at capacity. The grains went to compost.

I added my extract and did my boil and hops. I added water to the boil near the end to make 5 gallons to go into the fermentation bucket.

I got 1.093 OG. BeerSmith says this is in the high 80's for efficiency. Is there anything wrong with this process? I understand it has limitations in volume but given what I have to work with it seems like a reasonable way to mash and to sparge. It also seems like everyone else is doing something more complicated, or accepting lower efficiency. I'm obviously really happy with how this worked for me but don't want to run into a pitfall.

 

[erikpete18]

Overall I'd say your process sounds pretty good. The only reason most people probably don't do it that way is that a lot of stoves can't get that much water boiling real well. I know my electric ones never could, so when I went to full boils I had to switch to a propane burner outside. But so long as yours gets a good boil going, go for it!

There's only one thing I might be a little cautious about, and that's rinsing the grains the way you're doing it. Its possible to over-sparge grains and to start extracting tannins from them, which can give your beer an astrigent bite. The fact that your wort was still tasting sweet is probably a good sign, and its quite possible that you won't have any trouble with this batch. Tannin extraction comes from a combination of water temp and pH, so your water might be ok, but its something to consider. A lot of fly spargers (continuous sparging, which isn't exactly what you're doing, but close) will stop rinsing grains when they reach a certain gravity, generally around 1.010, to avoid tannin extraction. Next time, take a gravity measurement of that final rinse and see if you're near that, and that should tell you whether you need to worry or not.