Biab newbi

[clarkeuk]

That is absolutely fine, adding another coat/duvet over the top may reduce that loss a little but no problem just running with 2 degree drop over 60 mins at all.

When using grain you will need to heat your water a little higher, say 70-72°C, adding the grain (which will be at its stored temperature will reduce the temp of the water). I heat the water to 72°C, add the bag around the top of the boiler, spoon in and stir the grain and then my mash has a starting temp of 67-68°C - so lose around 4°C by adding the grain.

Don't worry at this stage about measuring efficiency - brew to a recipe and see if you hit the starting gravity, as long as you are close then all is good and you can measure/work on efficiency if required for future brews. Do the process right (and it sounds like you will) and your efficiency should take care of itself to a large degree.

Good luck with it and try and enjoy it - are you brewing this weekend ?

Spapro thanks again.
Was hoping to do.my brew this weekend but it's probably going to be next
Looking forward to it and it gives me a bit more time reading up

 

[clarkeuk]

That is absolutely fine, adding another coat/duvet over the top may reduce that loss a little but no problem just running with 2 degree drop over 60 mins at all.

When using grain you will need to heat your water a little higher, say 70-72°C, adding the grain (which will be at its stored temperature will reduce the temp of the water). I heat the water to 72°C, add the bag around the top of the boiler, spoon in and stir the grain and then my mash has a starting temp of 67-68°C - so lose around 4°C by adding the grain.

Don't worry at this stage about measuring efficiency - brew to a recipe and see if you hit the starting gravity, as long as you are close then all is good and you can measure/work on efficiency if required for future brews. Do the process right (and it sounds like you will) and your efficiency should take care of itself to a large degree.

Good luck with it and try and enjoy it - are you brewing this weekend ?

Spapro thanks again.
Was hoping to do.my brew this weekend but it's probably going to be next
Looking forward to it and it gives me a bit more time reading up

That is absolutely fine, adding another coat/duvet over the top may reduce that loss a little but no problem just running with 2 degree drop over 60 mins at all.

When using grain you will need to heat your water a little higher, say 70-72°C, adding the grain (which will be at its stored temperature will reduce the temp of the water). I heat the water to 72°C, add the bag around the top of the boiler, spoon in and stir the grain and then my mash has a starting temp of 67-68°C - so lose around 4°C by adding the grain.

Don't worry at this stage about measuring efficiency - brew to a recipe and see if you hit the starting gravity, as long as you are close then all is good and you can measure/work on efficiency if required for future brews. Do the process right (and it sounds like you will) and your efficiency should take care of itself to a large degree.

Good luck with it and try and enjoy it - are you brewing this weekend ?

 

[clarkeuk]

Spapro thanks again.
Was hoping to do.my brew this weekend but it's probably going to be next
Looking forward to it and it gives me a bit more time reading up

 

[clarkeuk]

Sorry not sure what happened there [emoji2]

 

[Tony1951]

Yep whatever works.. ! :mrgreen:

If you're doing a large batch like 20-23l then getting a full biab will need a 40l + pot, and Pecos and the Ace boilers are too small for that. So a separate sparge vessel to sparge is needed.

If I make a 10l batch in my 15l pot I have to sparge seperately, either dunk or pouring water over the grains.

I've worked out a new trick to get big beers of 23 litres out of my Ace boiler and I reckon you could do the same with any other boiler of similar size. Ditch the bag. No more dragging steaming hot heavy bags out of the boiler to let them drain. Just loose grain in teh boiler, strained through the filter on the tap. Deal with the grain after the sparging.

This is what I did.

1. heat up 15 litres of strike water to the required strike temp in the boiler.
2. stir in the grain (in my case 6.150kg). When fully mixed, button it all up and slip a sleeping bag over the boiler for sixty minutes.
3. Place a clean FV under the tap and drain out the wort. If you started with the volumes I listed above you'll get about 9 litres out of first run wort. Grain retains about 1 litre of water per kg used in the mash - hence the apparent loss.Sparging is done to get at this strong retained wort.
4. Tip in 10 litres of sparge water at 75C. Stir so that the whole grain mass is fluid in the wort. and leave for twenty minutes, stirring now and then to make sure you get maximum rinse of sugars from the grain.
5. Drain again into the FV. This time you'll get ten litres out because the grain was already soaked so no more is retained.
6. Tip in another 8 litres of sparge water at 75C, stir as before and leave for ten minutes with the occasional stir.
7. Drain all wort from the boiler, tipping forward at the end to get what is left in teh dead space below the tap.

Now you have to clean the boiler. Sounds bad, but it isn't. I brew up the top of the garden in a shed and have a hose pipe up there for water supply AND a compost bin in the corner of the garden. Put about ten litres of hose pipe water into the boiler, pick up the lot and swill it about a bit to fluidise the spent wort and water and upend it into the compost bin. Any straining type vessel would work for this if you don't have a compost bin and want to put the spent grain in the ordinary waste bin later.

My boiler took two good swills to get 99% of the grain out and a last one to leave it entirely clean. It wasn't too heavy to handle - maybe 18 or 20 KG all up. If you can't handle that much, this method probably isn't for you, but I'm 65 and found it easy.

This method will leave you with more wort than you can fit in the ACE boiler (25l max) so I retain the small balance of a few litres and boil that on the indoor kitchen stove while the ACE is steaming off in the shed for its boil. As it boils down I bring the boiled spare wort from the kitchen and top up the boiler. I ended with 23 - 24 litres of finished wort.

I got really clean wort out of this. The strainer in the boiler left the wort far cleaner than the mesh in my BIAB bag did - much finer than the bottom mesh of the bag, so much less trub after the boil. I also managed a high efficiency (about 75%) getting 1066 out of 6.150 kg of grain and about 23l of wort.

 

[Spapro]

I've started measuring the temperature of the grain and using a strike temperature calculator so that I can achieve the mash temperature that I want.

If you have accurately measured the weight of the grain, the volume of the mash water and the temperature of the grain, you can target an exact mash temperature and get pretty near it in the mash tun.

Depending where my grain has been stored, it has been at 22C and 14C in the last few weeks. That makes a heck of a difference to mash temperature if you always start with mash water at a certain level. I've been making IPAs lately and they need 6kg in 15 litres. If the grain is cold, that can make a big difference to the result.

This calculator works, but there are others on the web.

http://www.jimsbeerkit.co.uk/calc.html

Nice calculator, doesn't make too much difference to me (1°C) using 4.5kg of grain at 5°C or 20°C stored temp in 27 litres of heated water but take your point that if using 6kg of grain starts to make more difference to strike temp

 

[Spapro]

Spapro thanks again.
Was hoping to do.my brew this weekend but it's probably going to be next
Looking forward to it and it gives me a bit more time reading up

Just cancel everything else, you can't let work, family, birthdays, weddings or a funerals get in the way of your brewing man - you need to get things in perspective :wink:

 

[Simonh82]

how do you work out your efficiency simonh82

I used the recipe builder in Brewers friend. I initially set my efficiency at 75% which was quite high but I felt reasonably confident as I also invested in a grain crusher and crushed fine and squeezed hard.

At the end of the boil when I took a reading or was 4 points higher than planned, so played around with the efficiency figure until it matched my output. This turned out to be 80%.

 

[clarkeuk]

Thanks simonh82
Will look in to that at some point but I think I'll just see what gravity readings I get on this first brew n concentrate on the whole procedure first 👍