My first BIAB brew day.

GonzoNerd · Sep 3, 2016

I have been brewing off and on for a few years and I always intended to go all grain at some point. So I decided now was as good a time as any.

I had to upgrade some of my gear from my old aluminum turkey fryer set up. First up is the kettle, I bought the 15 gallon spike brewing kettle. I thought that this would be a size for the occasional low gravity ten gallon batch or a high gravity 5.

So shiny.

I picked up the recipe and ingredients from the local brew shop and used their grinder.

I got the brew bag, pulley system, gloves, and I even picked up the binder clips from brewinabag.com. I already had the ladder and this seemed to work fine.

I used the BIAB calculator to figure out the strike temp and water level for my 14lbs of grain. The mash temp was right where I wanted at 154, I gave it a pretty health stir and put it to bed.

I was just going to let it sit for the full hour but I decided to unbutton it at 30 minutes and give it one stir before wrapping it back up. I had these leftover moving blankets and a bungie to use for insulation. I was at about 152f at the end of the hour.

For the mash out I pulled some slack out of the system to get the bag off of the bottom.

I bought the thermal gloves from brew in a bag and squeezed the hell out of the bag while the wort came to a boil. The ratcheting pulley worked great.

The boil was much easier with my new kettle with the added head space.

Cooling was a little bit of an issue, my old chiller was a great size for a 7 gallon pot but was not ideal for this one. This should be my last day for it though since I got the confirmation that my Hydra has shipped.

My initial gravity came out at 1.063 which I am pretty proud of on my first brew. I am going to have to do some more research to determine what kind of efficiency that is. And here is it's home for the next few weeks.

I am optimistic at this point and I'm excited to try my first all grain beer.

soccerdad · Sep 3, 2016

For me personally, squeezing the hell out of the bag is overrated. Especially with ladder and pulley. Just let it drain. YMMV

Good job !

BongoYodeler · Sep 3, 2016

@GonzoNerd, thank you for starting this thread, and the excellent pictures. I've got a couple extract brews under my belt and have been thinking of moving outdoors and trying biab brewing. Just this morning I was looking at and comparing Spike's 10/15 with NB's MegaPot 1.2 10/15 gallon kettles. Although I don't think I'd ever brew anything more than 5 or 6 gallon batches (my fermenter is the Speidel 7.9 gallon), I eventually would like to brew bigger beers such as a RIS style beer, which I assume might necessitate going with a 15 gallon kettle. There are Labor Day specials going on now that would lower the price of whatever I decide to go with. I'm leaning towards the Spike but would listen to pros and cons of each.

As far as the pulley system, just how heavy are 14lbs of water logged grains? At what weight would it be highly recommended to use a pulley over trying to manually lift the bag?

Good luck with this and future batches, and please post an update on how this one turns out.

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GonzoNerd · Sep 3, 2016

I might try and just let it drain next time to compare the efficiency.

I'm happy with the spike kettle and it came with a high quality t-shirt in case you were on the fence. I wasn't able to find any real discounts on it though. I was above the 8.5 gallon mark with my grains and strike water. A high gravity RIS is definitely in my future.

The bag wasn't that heavy, I would say that you could probably lift it out without the pulley. The benefit for me was that I could pull some tension out with the ratcheting pulley for the mash out (I'm still not certain if this is important) and it was easy to let it dangle while I did the old squeeze job (also not certain if important.)

wilserbrewer · Sep 3, 2016

BongoYodeler said:
As far as the pulley system, just how heavy are 14lbs of water logged grains? At what weight would it be highly recommended to use a pulley over trying to manually lift the bag?

Lifting a bag w 10-15 lbs of grain manually isn't that difficult, the benefit of the ratchet pulley is that it allows you to lift the bag slowly as it drains to the kettleI, ratcheting it up a little bit at a time. Manually lifting the bag can be messy, the problem isn't lifting the bag, it's dealing with the wort continuously pouring out for a couple minutes....a ratchet pulley makes it easy without spilling a drop.

It's all about bag management, if lifting the bag manually, you best have a place to set it to drain immediately, with a pulley you just sit back and let it drain to the kettle.

BongoYodeler · Sep 4, 2016

Thank you both!!

Epos7 · Sep 4, 2016

Nice work! Thanks for posting a picture of your crush. That looks a lot finer than what I've been getting, which probably explains the low efficiencies I've seen. Any idea what the mill gap was set to on the mill you used?