New to all grain / wanting to make the switch

[mrbeachroach]

Hello all. 10+ brewing experience but looking to go to the next level.

CAn someone explain in a nutshell all grain

And secondly how this below works? As opposed to a mini mash. Pros and cons etc.

 

[brewshki]

What you have pictured here is essentially my setup. I think I may have different brand coolers, but it doesn't matter. It works extremely well, particularly for single infusion mashing.

All grain in a nutshell: you substitute the malt extract you typically use with base malts. If you are already using steeping grains, these largely remain the same. You are making a custom extract. You put your grains and warm water into one of the coolers above attempting to hit a certain temperature and just let them soak. As you soak the grain, they release sugar. after an hour, you drain the mash tun and rinse the grains, draining all of this liquid into your brew kettle. at this point, it is the same as extract brewing.

 

[bleme]

With extract, someone else got the sugar out of the grain and dehydrated it for you. On the plus side, they were an expert so they did everything right. On the down side, THEY decided what kind of grains to use, you have to pay for their efforts, and there is no way to tell how fresh it is.

All-grain is basically a maximized mini-mash. Crush the grain, add hot water, keep it close to 150F for an hour, and drain the resulting liquid. The Igloo you posted will certainly do the job as they are great at holding temperature for an hour. You could also use a bag (like you used on your mini-mash probably) for a lot less. It takes a little more to keep temperature, but there is less cleaning.

http://biabbags.webs.com/
https://www.brewinabag.com/
http://www.bagbrewer.com/order-a-bag.html

 

[mongoose33]

When you put crushed grain in a mash tun (or BIAB setup) with hot water (typically 158-170 degrees, depending on what mash temp it will drop to), enzymes in the crushed grain act to convert the starch in the grain to sugar.

After an hour (typically), you slowly draw off what is now essentially sugar water, along with flavors. At that point, once you have this put in the boil kettle, the process is the same as extract.

There's more to it than that, but in a nutshell, that's what's going on.

*************

To be successful in all-grain, you want to hit a prescribed mash temperature--usually the recipe will tell you--and you want the mash pH to be correct.

The former--temp--depends on the temperature of the water, the temperature of the grain, and how well you can hold the temp for an hour. I wrap my mash tun/biab setup in a sort of quilt thing to hold the heat in. As an example, once I decide to keep my crushed grain in the garage overnight before I brewed. Temp in the garage dropped to about 45 degrees overnight, and when I added the grain to the mash tun, guess what? The temp ended up lower than I intended, because the cold grain brought it down further than I wanted. Now, it stays in the house until needed.

The latter--pH--is dependent on a lot of factors, but you can adjust them via spreadsheets made for the purpose, such as EZWater and Brunwater.

Water is, IMO, the toughest thing to get right with all-grain. It may be best to start with reverse osmosis water (get it from wal-mart or similar) and adjust with some brewing salts and such according to the water spreadsheet.

It's possible your local water is good for brewing--and it's possible it's lousy for most brewing, as my local water is. If I were you, I'd see if there was another homebrewer nearby who could advise you on a water profile to start.

Good luck--I've done some amazing things with all-grain I doubt I ever could have achieved with extract only.

 

[Jtk78]

Over simplified:
Crush grain,
Soak grain,
Drain water

Optional depending on volumes above
Add water to rinse grain
Drain rinse water

Proceed as usual with boil.

There are many different ways to do it. The items you pictured are a mash tun (where the grains go) and a hot liquor tank (holds hot water for the rinsing part, or sparge water). If your handy, you could make those items yourself much cheaper. If we knew what you already have for equipment, how big of batches you plan to do, and where you plan to brew (kitchen, garage, shed etc) the great folks here could give you some options that would make the most sense for you.

Remember, ask 6 brewers for thier opinions and you'll get 10 answers though.

 

[mrbeachroach]

You guys are all awesome thanks for taking the time to explain this.

 

[mrbeachroach]

Makes Diving in a little bit less scary

 

[Kent88]

All-grain, you figure out what grains you need for your recipe, mostly a base malt with plenty of enzymes like 2-row, 6-row, pilsner, Maris Otter, etc, with other specialty malts like crystal, chocolate, roasted, etc, or even adjuncts like oats or rye. Crush the grains up yourself or have the brew shop do it for you.

Soak these grains in warm water (mash) for one hour. For every pound of grain you'll want somewhere between 1.3 to 2 quarts of water (YMMV) to start with, and you'll want the temperature of the mash to be somewhere between 149F to 158F. If the mash temperature drops a little just add a little boiling water. These calculators work great: https://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml . After the mash you can infuse with enough boiling water to raise the temperature to about 165F and do a "mash out", then wort is collected, and one usually sparges/lauters to rinse the grain of remaining fermentable sugar with warm (but below 170F) water, either by the batch sparge or fly sparge method. You should look up these methods because if you have questions about sparging they probably merit their own threads. There is also the No Sparge method, if you started with a really dilute mash. After you have sparged you boil just like if you were making an extract batch.

Also: http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/post2838/ , http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/post2839/

 

[mrbeachroach]

Thank you.

 

[RM-MN]

All-grain, you figure out what grains you need for your recipe, mostly a base malt with plenty of enzymes like 2-row, 6-row, pilsner, Maris Otter, etc, with other specialty malts like crystal, chocolate, roasted, etc, or even adjuncts like oats or rye. Crush the grains up yourself or have the brew shop do it for you.

Soak these grains in warm water (mash) for one hour. For every pound of grain you'll want somewhere between 1.3 to 2 quarts of water (YMMV) to start with, and you'll want the temperature of the mash to be somewhere between 149F to 158F. If the mash temperature drops a little just add a little boiling water. These calculators work great: https://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml . After the mash you can infuse with enough boiling water to raise the temperature to about 165F and do a "mash out", then wort is collected, and one usually sparges/lauters to rinse the grain of remaining fermentable sugar with warm (but below 170F) water, either by the batch sparge or fly sparge method. You should look up these methods because if you have questions about sparging they probably merit their own threads. There is also the No Sparge method, if you started with a really dilute mash. After you have sparged you boil just like if you were making an extract batch.

Also: http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/post2838/ , http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/post2839/

This step isn't needed for batch sparging, only for fly sparging. Cool water works nearly as well for batch sparging as hot water and it doesn't require another burner and pot. Using the cool water does increase the time to bring the wort to a boil but completely eliminates the chance for adding tannins as that requires both a high pH and temperature over 170.

 

[Kent88]

@RM-MN I think Brulosophy did an experiment (because they aren't xBeeriments, that is annoying) about using cool water to sparge and skipping the mash out. I don't mash out either, but I do try to keep things fairly warm so I'm not waiting forever for a boil.

 

[mongoose33]

There's a sort of myth out there that you need warm or hot sparge water to dissolve the sugar...except it's already dissolved. All a sparge is doing is rinsing the sugar from the grain, but it doesn't need to be dissolved.

I always heated my sparge water but only to shorten the time necessary to reach a boil. Now I do BIAB so it's moot, but heating the sparge water was only a convenience, not a necessity.

 

[flars]

I would also suggest purchasing the latest edition of Palmer's "How To Brew" before diving in to all grain. Keep your first all grain brewing simple until you understand the process, water additions, and pH for mash and sparge. Brew a clone of a commercial beer you like. Then brew the same recipe until you like it and can successfully repeat it.

 

[Hwk-I-St8]

Some great posts here. I'll add a few things:

First, BIAB (Brew In A Bag) is arguably the easiest approach. You can bypass sparging (the process of rinsing more sugars out of the mashed grains) completely, it only requires one kettle (although usually a bit bigger kettle is needed) and it really makes things simple. The hardest part is maintaining the temp during the (usually) 60 minute mash.

The other approach is a multi-vessel approach where you mash in a mash tun (a cooler works well), then follow a process of draining the liquids and rinsing with more water to get the most sugars out. The rinsing is called sparging and there are two basic approaches:
Fly Sparge - arguably the more complex approach, with this you add hot water into the mash tun at the same rate you're draining. The idea is that the hot water will stay on top, effectively pushing the sugar rich mash water out the bottom. As the sparge water works it way down, it rinses more sugars out. It requires a setup that ensures water is drained evenly across the bottom of the mash tun to be most effective.

An easier approach is batch sparge. Drain all the initial mash liquids out. Dump in more hot water, stir it up and drain again. It requires more exact calcs on water volumes, but it's faster and easier (IMO).

Water chemisty is somewhat of an issue with all grain. pH matters, as does the mineral content of the water. I use Reverse Osmosis (RO) water and add inexpensive chemicals (and possible acidulated malt for pH) to get the water profile I want.

This all may sound overwhelming at first, but it's really not complicated and there's a ton of information online. There are also fantastic tools for calculating everything from what temp water to add to your grains to get the exact mash temp you want to tools that will figure out how much minerals and acid or acid malt to add to get the flavor profile and pH you want.

One other thing about the kit you listed. A lot of people love the round coolers, but I've had really good luck with a standard Coleman rectangular cooler. Instead of a false bottom, I use a BIAB bag that I got sized to fit. I use that, batch sparge, and the results have been great. I also have capacity to mash 30 lbs of grain, which is nice for a big Bourbon County type stout. They're also less expensive than the round ones.

Good Luck and don't be scared off. It's not that hard and the old adage "Relax, don't worry, have a home brew" holds true. It's a very forgiving process.

 

[wilserbrewer]

JMO, I’m not fan of the two cooler system the OP listed above.

IMO it involves too much moving water around, easier to use a second pot and not move heated water to another container.

Or other work arounds include full volume mash, cold sparge, catching first runnings in a bucket, and heating sparge water in your brew kettle.

Brewing is enough work without building work into your system. My $.02