First brew on my Unibrau last weekend. Went through a steep learning curve and I felt like I did when I first tried a brew on my 3 V setup! I didn’t do any dry runs so it was trial and error while hoping to produce a decent enough beer at the end.
5 gallon batch, 12lbs of grains. According to the formula I needed 7.2Gal of water. The mash was dry and at one point it got stuck and emerged the heating element. Luckily I was there and managed to stir it all up enough to get it all to flow again. The hop screen got clogged up pretty bad with hops during the whirlpool.
I ended up with just around 5.5 gallons of wort. Which yielded me 3.5 gallons at the end of the boil (which I already shortened to 45 min). My gravity was at 1.08!! (Target 1.056). I ended up throwing a gallon and a half of water in the fermenter (haven’t done that since I stopped extract brewing LOL) just to make it all more drinkable.
take aways:
- the combination of the Brewcommander and the Unibräu setup is an extremely powerful and impressive system. Water heats up insanely fast and the boil was very vigorous.
-I need at least two more gallons of water to start. The pre boil volume needs to be closer to 7.5G to end up with 5.5G. Im hoping that a wetter mash will prevent plugging up the recirculation.
- seeing the final gravity, the efficiency seems to be in good shape
- I will not use the hop screen next time.
- sparge arm got plugged up but the pump is powerful enough to keep it going. Might start using a brew bag though
- I removed the grain basket away from the kettle right away. Next time I might keep it suspended over the kettle while heating the wort or even during the boil to let it drip out longer.
- despite the learning curve and having to heat up two separate batches of mash water (first one for contaminated with some production grime that I had missed in cleaning), my brew day still only lasted 4 hours. I think I can get that down to 3.5 altogether eventually, which is awesome!