How to brew your own beer - The All Grain method

[The_blue]

Will do when i get chance but basically it's item 221023837779 New Dog Cat Pet Rabbit Horse Food Meal Airtight Reseal Storage Container Bucketfrom the auction place.

1 2.4kw element from somewhere like copper kettle and a tank connector and 15mm ball valve.

Did have a bag i made for the old one but for this I've just used a wilco budget net curtain.

simples!

 

[metbandit1]

What is this I dont even?



Looking at starting all grain brewing. Been reading about it for 7 days straight!
Only thing that really confuses me is water levels and when to add them at different parts.=/

 

[dinger44]

Its like this.

http://www.jimsbeerkit.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=19662&p=225407&hilit=parva#p225407

 

[Mrs Seabiscuit]

What is this I dont even?



Looking at starting all grain brewing. Been reading about it for 7 days straight!
Only thing that really confuses me is water levels and when to add them at different parts.=/

Hello welcome dude! do come in grab a beer and read this thread you will be fine :
May I suggest this:-
http://www.brewuk.co.uk/store/featured/complete-woodfordes-starter-equipment-set.html
It gets you everything to get you started it also includes a beer kit worth £25 and it is a very nice beer.
With kits you cant really go wrong as everything except the water is measured for you and even then 40 pints is 23 litres! I strongly recommend this way first before you get into all grain. Just remember the golden rule is cleanliness make sure all of your equipment is clean and sterile.

 

[Kanifee]

Hello welcome dude! do come in grab a beer and read this thread you will be fine :
May I suggest this:-
http://www.brewuk.co.uk/store/featured/complete-woodfordes-starter-equipment-set.html
It gets you everything to get you started it also includes a beer kit worth £25 and it is a very nice beer.
With kits you cant really go wrong as everything except the water is measured for you and even then 40 pints is 23 litres! I strongly recommend this way first before you get into all grain. Just remember the golden rule is cleanliness make sure all of your equipment is clean and sterile.

Quoted as sound advice, a kit will get you used to certain universal aspects of home brewing that are essential in any part of the hobby, sanitation, hydrometers, what to expect in fermentation and conditioning etc.

It's a very rewarding hobby and in more ways than just lots of beer lol, you really can't go wrong with a kit along as you do some research, sanitize, have a little patience, sanitize, and most of all enjoy the whole process. Did I mention sanitize?


On another note my ipa is smelling phenomenal, really hoppy, primary fermentation should be done with and rested in 4 or 5 days so I can get über amounts of dry hopping done for an aroma explosion! Can't wait to taste my Tetgold IPA, did I say patience metbandit? Not always that easy

 

[metbandit1]

Thanks for the advice .
Only thing about the kits is that they don't really seem like a challenge....
I know sanitizing is the main thing with brewing, but I don't really fancy sanitizing the kit then just adding the Stuff to the FV, fermenting then kegging and leaving it.

Its not a challenge!

Ive just read the self sufficiency home brewing book, paying the most attention to AG brewing, and ive ordered the CAMRA homebrewing book to read next week.

I guess growing up knowing about the brewing industry and now working within it has made me not want to use kits too

 

[Kanifee]

hey if you have knowledge, are eager for the experience and do the research there is no reason not to go allgrain, i have only done 3 kits and on my third also did an all grain brew at the same time. there are mini mash brews you could consider also to start you off, specialty grains, hops, boil time and mashing just smaller scale and a little help from liquid/dry malt extract to cut down the grain bill.

all that aside you sound like you are a man of conviction and have pretty much set your self on the path of AG so i say to you good luck and welcome to the hobby, im sure you will have no problems.


water levels appear more complicated than they actually are, some of the info you need wont be available to you untill you have your brewing gear; mash efficiency, Hot liquor tun/Mash tun/boiler dead space for instance. stuff like hop water absorption and grain absorption can be pretty well calculate from online info.
many people have different methods, i got all in a spin on my brew but just opted for a 50/50 split, i calculated with all the above in account i needed 37 liters in total to reach an end result of 23 liters in the fv, i did a 18.5 liter 60 minute mash and 18.5 liter 10 minute batch sparge and it seemed to work just fine for me, i say this with jest as i broke my hydro so have no OG and boiled for too long before starting my hop addition @ 60 minutes so ended with a 90 minute boil, i had to add 2 liters of water at the end to bring to volume but the extra boil time didn't have hops in so wont effect the final goal for the beer, i cant chart my efficiency as i didn't get an OG but my wort was uber sweet and uber tasty so i have no worrys and think i was not too far off.

best advice i can give you is now you have done some reading just go for it!

 

[metbandit1]

I was going to ask what ABV you were going to aim for then I read about your smashing the hydro .

Batch sparging seems to be easier than trying to sparge while draining. I guess it gives less of a chance of your beer going cloudy which is good.

Ive seen this kit in a brewshop near me
http://www.matchlesshomebrewing.co.uk/menu/product/&ID=473
and im just in the throws of getting a space in the garage clear enough to fit it in.

I guess I can save up cash while I wait!

 

[PaulStat]

Just go straight for AG I did, it's not that hard, I can generally do a brew day in under 6 hours now

 

[metbandit1]

Just go straight for AG I did, it's not that hard, I can generally do a brew day in under 6 hours now

Excellent! Ill get the ball rolling then by starting to clear the garage (aka Brewery) at the weekend

 

[seabiscuit]

Lidl have got a 27l "jam maker" coming up later in the month for £50ish. Ok, it's a 1.8KW element so would be a slow boil, but I've heard of people using them as a cheap boiler.
Hmm, how to persuade MrsSeakitchen we need one as a HLT so we can do two all grain brews in a day. And so she can make jam. Lots of jam.
Shhhh people. She'll never read this thread to know my schemes.

As a side not our immersion chiller has arrived today.

 

[Mrs Seabiscuit]

Lidl have got a 27l "jam maker" coming up later in the month for £50ish. Ok, it's a 1.8KW element so would be a slow boil, but I've heard of people using them as a cheap boiler.
Hmm, how to persuade MrsSeakitchen we need one as a HLT so we can do two all grain brews in a day. And so she can make jam. Lots of jam.
Shhhh people. She'll never read this thread to know my schemes.

As a side not our immersion chiller has arrived today.

Yeah you see seabiscuit I can see through all your grrand schemes.
We should get one though as I said last year Id like to make Jam.

 

[seabiscuit]

So we did our first brew using the chiller last night. It leaks. Oh, T-shirt!!!
so I'll try getting a jubilee clip, see if that helps. Otherwise it'll be a case of picking RJKOneil and NathWraith's collective hivemind and seeing if any of the watercooling tubing and clips we stock might work. I guess it still counts as water cooling, right?
Oooh, now that's got me thinking. I wonder if a rad could be used like a plate chiller, particularly if it's submerged rather than with air?

 

[seabiscuit]

We've now made an Oat Stout and had a bit of a disaster during the mash. The ad hoc BIAB bag we use (bit of muslin cloth) wasn't large enough to contain the grain easily when I lifted it out of the boiler. And as there was about 7kg dry grain in the mash it wasn't all that easy to lift out when wet either. But a fair bit of the grain leaked out of the top of the bag into the boiler.
We poured the grainy wort through seives to get the grain out, but was a tense time.
So it's not been in the fermenter a couple of days. It was going mental in there. Krausen almost to the lid, I though we were going to have it leak out of the airlock.
Initial gravity of 1060, so I'm anticipating it fermenting to about 6%ish. I'm thinking about bottling this one as we're not massive stout drinkers, so a full barrel might take some time to finnish (that we could have a different brew in).
As for our earlier brew using US-05 it's much nicer now a couple of weeks down the line. I think though it still needs more conditioning, but that's not really likely to happen as we're drinking it while watching through the BBCs Sherlock Blu-Rays. Good times.

 

[dinger44]

Im not too sure about the biab thing but i would think the bits of grain would stay in the trub at the end of the boil. You cant mess up a stout. I had my grain filter manifold thing come apart while batch sparging before. had to jug the whole mash into buckets, then put it back together again, loaded it all back in and drained it. It turned out lovely lol. Forgot the protoflac another time. Still nice. Itll be a great pint!

 

[seabiscuit]

Our local brewery (have mentioned them before, so I don't want to be accused of advertising) has just given me and MrsSeakitchen some Galaxy hops to try (yay!). The hop cones are huge! Over an inch long, and with loads of sticky resin. Mmmmm. Apparently they'd bought some to experiment with, but they're not available on a large enough scale at the moment for them, so they've given us a 100g (well, less what they've used, which isn't much) pack. Was planning on making a summer beer with some cascade as a late hop, and dry hopping with the galaxy. Any suggestions for what to use as a bittering hop with this?

So, word to the wise, take your local independent brewery a sample of your beer and chat with them. They've been so enthusiastic and helpful to us, it's just amazing.

 

[Mrs Seabiscuit]

Well we have siphoned our first stout into bottles and a barrel we had the obligatory taste test and its lovely it tastes so very nice. mmmmmmmmm

 

[seabiscuit]

.... it tastes so very once. mmmmmmmmm

Very once? Have you been sampling some more this morning
But yes, the oat stout did seem very impressive. Nice and creamy texture. Looking forward to it conditioning longer and carbonating. While it was bit of a pain to make, I think we will be making it again. But not straight away.

 

[seabiscuit]

OK so we tried some of the Galaxy hopped beer from the fermenter as we barreled it last night (see post #196 above).
Single hopped Galaxy.
4.5kg Marris Otter
1tsp black patent for a touch of colour

20g Galaxy 90 mins
20g Galaxy 10 mins
20g Galaxy Flameout (well, unplugged at wall)

Yeast was US-05. It has worked really well with this. There isn't the harshness/sharpness we had with our first attempt using it.

It has ended up very nice. Very nice indeed. I think possibly could have done with slightly more bittering hops, but I think we always have that problem. I think it's because we use hop bags rather than a hop filer at the moment.
It's very pale and a bit hazy, but if I bought this in a pub, I'd be very happy with the pub for selling such a nice beer. A good, light tasty summer ale.

So we've got a couple of liter bottles conditioning to take to Slaters Ales in Stafford who gave us the hops to try, so in a couple of weeks we'll see what the pro's think.


/Edit...
Brewing this afternoon.....(designed in Beersmith)
Amt Name Type # %/IBU
3.50 kg Pale Malt, Maris Otter (5.9 EBC) Grain 1 68.5 %
1.00 kg Lager Malt (3.9 EBC) Grain 2 19.6 %
0.25 kg British Caramalt (30.0 EBC) Grain 3 4.9 %
0.25 kg Carared (39.4 EBC) Grain 4 4.9 %
0.10 kg Wheat, Torrified (3.3 EBC) Grain 5 2.0 %
0.01 kg Black (Patent) Malt (985.0 EBC) Grain 6 0.2 %
30.00 g Progress [6.25 %] - Boil 90.0 min Hop 7 19.6 IBUs
10.00 g Galaxy [12.00 %] - Boil 90.0 min Hop 8 12.5 IBUs
20.00 g Dana [12.60 %] - Boil 10.0 min Hop 9 8.9 IBUs
20.00 g Dana [12.60 %] - Aroma Steep 0.0 min Hop 10 0.0 IBUs
1.0 pkg SafAle English Ale (DCL/Fermentis #S-04) [23.66 ml] Yeast

So with Australian Galaxy hops, British Progress hops and Dana Slovenian hops it can only really be called Dana International (ok, I'll admit this is mainly to Troll MrsSeakitchen however)
/end of edit

 

[dinger44]

Nice! I just brewed a galaxy smash. Due to my extreme laziness its been in the fermentor for 3 weeks. Used S04 as it was all i had in the fridge. Sadly on the last bottle of summer lightening tonight so id better get it bottled up. Ive never tasted galaxy before but am a big fan of citra.