Mash and Boil for 250.00

[Beer-lord]

Relax, don't worry. Have a homebrew!

[berryman]

I think I will try the full volume no sparge method on a small batch like you guys are playing with, I will have to scale down or make up something new to fit in a LBK because all I have for a small fermenter, it sounds a lot easier then the way I have been doing it, but I get decent numbers...
My last batch brewed 3/6...5 lbs Rahr 2 row, 4 lbs Rahr white wheat, .5 lb cara 20, .5 lb carapils .5 rice hulls 3 gal 24 oz strike water @ 159 it dropped down to 151 ( I put a long stem therm. right in the middle and not in the hole in the cover) I use a lot of bottom water as I am mashing in to keep it soupy and easy to stir, set the M&B to 152 and let it sit for about 15 min then recirculate about every 10 to 15 min. I also did a little longer mash on this one, because I forgot to turn my sparge water heater on and had to wait for it to heat up so it was a 80 min Mash. Sparged with around 3.5-4 gal 175 deg water and took a little over 30 mins. to get a 6 gal starting volume and the temp corrected reading was 1.049 preboil. I have my grain mill @.050 and single crush but do get some fine stuff. I have one more coming up first and this one will be a higher OG then I have been doing lately and am going to push the M&B close to the max.

[berryman]

Banjo, I would say they are pretty darn close and the reading might depend on the camera angle, mine starts at 4 gal. I tried to get my long haired, bearded head down in there to look straight on but wouldn't fit....

[Banjo-guy]

Banjo, I would say they are pretty darn close and the reading might depend on the camera angle, mine starts at 4 gal. I tried to get my long haired, bearded head down in there to look straight on but wouldn't fit....

They look the same to me. I can’t my head in there either!

[bpgreen]

As I did last time, I set the mash water up last night and had it so it would be ready to go when I woke up, and set it to maintain temperature for 3 hours, so it would be ready if I woke up early and would still be ready if I slept in.

I didn't really watch the time carefully on how long it took to come to a boil, but I think it took about an hour. I thought I had too much liquid (and also called my mom, so was on the phone when the timer went off), so I boiled the bittering hops longer than the planned 60 minutes.

When I sparged to the point where I had 5.5 (maybe more like 5.75) gallons, I pulled the basket out and set it in a large pot until I had time to deal with it.

I used a couple of silicone steamer mats that mashani mentioned. That slowed the drainage a bit, I think. I think that may have helped with extracting more in the sparge, but I don't know.

I put my whole leaf hops in bags and pulled them out at the end of the boil.

After I finished, I got online and read some of the other comments here. And realized that I might have room for more wort. So I squeezed the hop bags to get anything they had absorbed. I then looked at the pot where I stashed the basket and there was some wort in that, as well (probably not much sugar in it, but more than filtered tap water). So I added that to the wort squeezed from the hop bags and build for about a half hour, then added it to the wort in the M&B.

I've got quite a bit of dried spent grain in my pantry, so I just dug a hole in the garden and buried what I got from this batch (I don't have enough high carbon matter to keep it from stinking up the compost pile).

I have my grain mill @.050 and single crush but do get some fine stuff. I have one more coming up first and this one will be a higher OG then I have been doing lately and am going to push the M&B close to the max.

According to their documentation, 16 lbs is max. I did a little under 14 lbs today, mostly because my first attempt had such poor conversion that I wanted a cushion. If I get the 72% efficiency that I copied from the Williams FB page, I'll have a pretty strong beer (NTTAWWT). A word of warning: With that much grain, the inset thing is HEAVY. That stands to reason, but I was surprised at just how heavy it was.

[mashani]

Mine starts at 2 gallons.

This is my measurement. My gallon markings are "spot on" when I measure into it a gallon at a time, they always line up with the water level.

So ??? Internal diameter is slightly different or what? Dunno...

IMG_0026.JPG (110.02 KiB) Viewed 1541 times

[mashani]

I think I will try the full volume no sparge method on a small batch like you guys are playing with.

This calculator has been pretty close to spot on with the volume #'s for me for both batches I've done using 7.5 gallon "kettle" size, 0.5 gallon "trub" and 0.5 gallon "boil off rate" and the default grain absorption rate.

http://www.biabcalculator.com/

But the calculated strike temp left my mash a few degrees too high the first time, so I took a degree off this time. It was still higher, so I might take 2 degrees off next time. So, If you are worried about it and really want a dry beer you might want to go a bit lower. But the volumes worked out pretty much perfectly.

This is the batch I made yesterday in the fermenter, it's hard for you to see the markings on the fermenter, but my 3 gallon target ended up just a bit above the 11L mark, so a bit more then 2.9 gallons. Close enough. That was without tipping and dumping any kettle trub into the fermenter, if I did, I could have gotten more, but I wanted to check the boil off at 0.5/hr and see how close it really was since last time I screwed up the volume and boiled it down extra because of it. It's close, just a tad more, so I might tweak it upwards slightly next time and see.

IMG_0029 (002).jpg (32.86 KiB) Viewed 1534 times

If I continue to no-chill these batches, I'm thinking about getting some 190 degree rated heavy food grade HDPE containers for use in the summer. In my 56-57 degree basement for these 3 gallon batches it's only down to 80 after about 16 hours right now in the mash & boil. The double wall insulation works both ways. I'm afraid that a 5 gallon batch in a 70 degree summer basement might take more then 24 hours to chill if left in the M&B, and I don't want to leave it in there for 36 hours. I'd just let it chill to 190 on its own, then rack into the container, it should cool faster that way, and even if not, at least I know it will be safe 36-48 hours later if I can't get to it, where I think leaving it that long in the M&B no matter how I protect it would be pushing my luck with my house brett.

It's that or buy a really good wort chiller like a hydra. I can't use my current wort chiller in the M&B.

[mashani]

This batch is cooling now (no chill approach). I'll know tomorrow how well it worked.

You know you can test your gravity while the wort is still hot right? You just have to plug the reading into a calculator that adjusts for temperature, knowing what your hydrometer is calibrated for.

https://www.brewtoad.com/tools/hydromet ... correction

That's how I know what my post-mash/pre-boil gravity and post-boil gravity is without chilling first.

Just don't burn the hell out of yourself pulling samples please.

[Beer-lord]

I use many calculators and the one mashani linked to is the mist accurate fir me.

[bpgreen]

This batch is cooling now (no chill approach). I'll know tomorrow how well it worked.

You know you can test your gravity while the wort is still hot right? You just have to plug the reading into a calculator that adjusts for temperature, knowing what your hydrometer is calibrated for.

https://www.brewtoad.com/tools/hydromet ... correction

That's how I know what my post-mash/pre-boil gravity and post-boil gravity is without chilling first.

Just don't burn the hell out of yourself pulling samples please.

I did I know that, but figured I'd just wait until I fill the fermenter. Habit, I guess.

[mashani]

When doing AG, I've always liked to do one post-mash/pre-boil because at that point it's easy to adjust with some DME if you wanted to, or like in the case of my first batch in the M&B to decide how much to boil it down a bit more to concentrate the wort if you do a post-mash/pre-boil gravity reading and had an "oops" happen. As long as your boil off rate is known/consistent, it's easy to guess what your post boil OG will end up as from that number.

[bpgreen]

When doing AG, I've always liked to do one post-mash/pre-boil because at that point it's easy to adjust with some DME if you wanted to, or like in the case of my first batch in the M&B to decide how much to boil it down a bit more to concentrate the wort if you do a post-mash/pre-boil gravity reading and had an "oops" happen. As long as your boil off rate is known/consistent, it's easy to guess what your post boil OG will end up as from that number.

I checked pre-boil and I think it was more than 1.050 temperature adjusted. I figured the boil would increase that to some extent.

I got curious after typing that.

It's still not cooled to pitching temps, but I pulled a hydrometer sample and it's showing 1.056 corrected. According to BeerSmith, it looks like I got about 57% efficiency, which isn't great, but is a lot better than 40%. For my PM BiaB batches, I set my efficiency to 65% and usually got pretty close to that. I'm sure I could have done better if I tried, but it wasn't a big deal to me since most of my fermentables came from extract. Now that I'm moving to all grain, I'm going to need to improve my numbers a bit. This beer will likely end up being around 5.5-6% instead of 7.5, which is ok, but I'm a cheapskate, and I want to get more from my grains to make it more cost effective.

[mashani]

If you haven't done so with your PMs before, maybe you should check your water and/or mash PH and see what it is, especially if your using a different water to grain ratio in the mash & boil then you were before. If it ends up too far out of whack then your conversion is going to be affected as the enzymes don't like it when it gets too much below 5.2 and too much above 5.6 or there about.

I'm lucky that with just a bit of campden and a wee little bit of acidulated malt I'm in good range for many beers with my water right now for the full volume mashes I've been doing. For a really dark beer like a stout, I will probably just cold steep and add post mash, which will make it stupidly simple instead of messing around a lot with my water.

If I was going to do a comp beer I might build from RO but for most stuff I don't think I need or want to bother with it except for a BoPils or the like. Simple acid adjustment is way easier and will work fine for me for most of what I make I think.

[bpgreen]

So I checked the gravity this morning and it looks like it's 1.060. I don't know why there was a difference, but there it is. That's more like 61% efficiency, which is not as good as what I was getting before, but I was only getting 65% before, so it's not a huge drop.

I'd like to improve that and I think I can. But it'll be a while before I make another batch, due to a lack of open kegs.

I'll look into checking my water/mash pH.

[berryman]

I've been getting a little over 3/4 gal. boil - off @ 60 min but did a 45 min boil on my last batch and it was exactly .5. This is a lot more consistent then when I was using the gas burner. I could easy over boil with that and this comes out the same every time. One thing I found is you have to watch close when bringing to the boil for a hot break if you are close to the top, it's not like picking a kettle off the gas burner, if you shut the elements off they are still hot and producing heat.