BeerDuck
Member
Okay, so. I've just started brewing again from taking a hiatus for about a year and a half due to life issues and had to purchase all-new equipment. When I'd left off, it was a group of us from work would get together and brew a batch (all-grain at the end) just about every week. Each of us sort of did our part for it, so we got really good at bits and basically competent at the rest.
Oh, what a year does to memory. Welcome to the seven-hour start to brewing.
So I built myself a mash tun from a cooler. Works great. No issue there. The digital temperature probe I bought, however, failed right after I poured out the warming water from the tun and I put the grain and strike water in. I'm going to take a guess, but non-boiling water doesn't usually reach 330F. Okay, fine. I found a candy thermometer in my drawers and tossed it into the tun. Mash was too cold - added water to get it up, too hot, had to stir it. Somewhere along the way, the thermometer started taking on wort. So the last good reading said ~155F. Sealed it up. Call it a day on that one. Anyone have a waterproof digital thermometer with a probe on a line? I would really, really like to be able to monitor temps with the mash tun closed so I don't keep bleeding heat from the mash.
After I sparged and started to drain, I became worried that my mash tun was taking forever and a day to empty. Is this normal? I'm talking over 45m to drain the grain bed down to where it was just a trickle out of the mash tun. The beer maintained ~135F through to the end, starting at about ~150F at the beginning of draining the tun. Would covering the brewkettle while I'm draining the tun help preserve temps, or does it not matter?
Did have a small boil-over during the hot break. Not much got lost, but enough to make me start cursing. I think this was brought on by me trying to get it back up to temp too quickly. How quickly do you need to bring on the heat? I got it back to a slow rolling boil fairly shortly after the hot break, but I vaguely recall you can quell the boil over by adding the hops when this happens?
Got through the boil after that just fine - actually chilled the thing in the pool. 30,000 gal of 78F water cools a kettle REAL quick. But then tried to siphon into primary. Fermetch auto siphons suck. End of story. Bloody thing broke on me - got stuffed with hops even though I was using the cap on it to stop that sort of thing. Ended up having to pour the kettle into a funnel I had wrapped the spout in my hops bag to strain out the stuff we don't want in the primary. Did I just get a bad siphon or is there some trick to it that I don't know?
Help a rusty newbie. How do I fix these problems in the future?
Duck
Oh, what a year does to memory. Welcome to the seven-hour start to brewing.
So I built myself a mash tun from a cooler. Works great. No issue there. The digital temperature probe I bought, however, failed right after I poured out the warming water from the tun and I put the grain and strike water in. I'm going to take a guess, but non-boiling water doesn't usually reach 330F. Okay, fine. I found a candy thermometer in my drawers and tossed it into the tun. Mash was too cold - added water to get it up, too hot, had to stir it. Somewhere along the way, the thermometer started taking on wort. So the last good reading said ~155F. Sealed it up. Call it a day on that one. Anyone have a waterproof digital thermometer with a probe on a line? I would really, really like to be able to monitor temps with the mash tun closed so I don't keep bleeding heat from the mash.
After I sparged and started to drain, I became worried that my mash tun was taking forever and a day to empty. Is this normal? I'm talking over 45m to drain the grain bed down to where it was just a trickle out of the mash tun. The beer maintained ~135F through to the end, starting at about ~150F at the beginning of draining the tun. Would covering the brewkettle while I'm draining the tun help preserve temps, or does it not matter?
Did have a small boil-over during the hot break. Not much got lost, but enough to make me start cursing. I think this was brought on by me trying to get it back up to temp too quickly. How quickly do you need to bring on the heat? I got it back to a slow rolling boil fairly shortly after the hot break, but I vaguely recall you can quell the boil over by adding the hops when this happens?
Got through the boil after that just fine - actually chilled the thing in the pool. 30,000 gal of 78F water cools a kettle REAL quick. But then tried to siphon into primary. Fermetch auto siphons suck. End of story. Bloody thing broke on me - got stuffed with hops even though I was using the cap on it to stop that sort of thing. Ended up having to pour the kettle into a funnel I had wrapped the spout in my hops bag to strain out the stuff we don't want in the primary. Did I just get a bad siphon or is there some trick to it that I don't know?
Help a rusty newbie. How do I fix these problems in the future?
Duck
