superfluent
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2008
- Messages
- 422
- Reaction score
- 2
SWMBO decided to go visit her grandma so I figured I'd do my second AG ever today (actually second batch ever). I'm brewing in my apartment and I've (almost)put together a stowable, ultra small footprint 5-6 gl RIMS rig. It's electric and for this session I decided to try out the new PID controller I've designed for the RIMS.
This time I also did my own crush. I had saved some "pro-crushed" malt from the first batch and I used that as a reference to dial in the cheapo Porkert mill I picked up last week. It turned out to be farily easy to dial in the mill to get a crush that was almost indistinguishable from the reference.
I like to pretend I'm a a daredevil so I took a deep breath and scaled grainbill for 80% efficiency.:cross:
I fired up the RIMS and I used a reference thermometer to check how the controller was doing. The PID thermocouple and the reference did not agree at all (good thing I have ready access to a $50.000 thermal camera to settle the argument...
).
I mashed for 60 minutes and sparged for about 20 minutes. A "small mishap " put about 2-3 litres of wort on the floor and I had to basically abort the sparging to take care of the mess.
Now for the nice part: Even though I did abort the sparge and lost a couple of litres of wort, I managed to get 81% efficiency. Had I not lost the wort on the floor I would have been atleast 85%, and If I had not stopped sparging it would probably been a couple of percent higher
This time I'd also armed myself with proper cooling eqipment (it cooled to pitching temp within 10-15 minutes as opposed to 2 hrs for the first batch sitting in a plastic bucket in the bath tub...I guess the taste will suffer from that...). I also managed to remember to add Protafloc (a concentrate of the active components in Irish Moss that I got from my prefered HBS). I guess the Protafloc and the much reduced cooling time really increased the amount of trub because this time I had to siphon the wort into the fermenter because the hop-back I had fitted to the boiler outlet clogged up instantly. Probably will leave hop-back out for the next batch and instead just do whirlpooling and siphoning instead.
All in all I managed to get almost 5 gl of OG 1.070 into the fermenter. This is so much fun!
H
This time I also did my own crush. I had saved some "pro-crushed" malt from the first batch and I used that as a reference to dial in the cheapo Porkert mill I picked up last week. It turned out to be farily easy to dial in the mill to get a crush that was almost indistinguishable from the reference.
I like to pretend I'm a a daredevil so I took a deep breath and scaled grainbill for 80% efficiency.:cross:
I fired up the RIMS and I used a reference thermometer to check how the controller was doing. The PID thermocouple and the reference did not agree at all (good thing I have ready access to a $50.000 thermal camera to settle the argument...
).I mashed for 60 minutes and sparged for about 20 minutes. A "small mishap
" put about 2-3 litres of wort on the floor and I had to basically abort the sparging to take care of the mess.Now for the nice part: Even though I did abort the sparge and lost a couple of litres of wort, I managed to get 81% efficiency. Had I not lost the wort on the floor I would have been atleast 85%, and If I had not stopped sparging it would probably been a couple of percent higher
This time I'd also armed myself with proper cooling eqipment (it cooled to pitching temp within 10-15 minutes as opposed to 2 hrs for the first batch sitting in a plastic bucket in the bath tub...I guess the taste will suffer from that...). I also managed to remember to add Protafloc (a concentrate of the active components in Irish Moss that I got from my prefered HBS). I guess the Protafloc and the much reduced cooling time really increased the amount of trub because this time I had to siphon the wort into the fermenter because the hop-back I had fitted to the boiler outlet clogged up instantly. Probably will leave hop-back out for the next batch and instead just do whirlpooling and siphoning instead.
All in all I managed to get almost 5 gl of OG 1.070 into the fermenter. This is so much fun!
H
