I won this kit in the Home Brew Company raffle on this forum, one of the conditions of entering being that the winners write a review for the forum. So here goes...
Firstly, I'm not new to AG, but so far have only done 5 BIABs before, so wouldn't consider myself an expert by any means. The instructions that came with the kit were pretty poor, so I thought I'd just stick to my normal BIAB routine as I've been happy with the results I've had so far.
Picture below shows you what you get when you open the box - a bag of mixed grains, three packets of hops labelled 60mins, 15mins and 0mins which I took to mean the timings from the end of the boil - that'd be a bit confusing for a newbie I think - a packet of yeast and a tablet of whirlfloc. Plus the `instructions'.
Next picture is my boiler at my `workstation'. I just put that in to wind up all those people who spend hours and hours sanitising their entire environment before they start brewing.:lol:
I usually put in about 4 gallons of water to heat up for the mash as the boiler is 30litre and you have to leave room for the grains. I did the same this time but forgot that as it's quite a strong brew there'd be a bigger volume of grains. Luckily by the time I'd added all the grains and stirred them in there was still about half an inch of clearance til the top of the boiler.
I leave the boiler set at 65 so the heater clicks on and off throughout the mash and I occasionally check that the temperature is more or less correct. I mash for 90mins. Then I haul the bag out of the boiler using a rope to hang it over it to drain. This was the only problem I had making the brew - it seemed that something in the grain was fine enough to totally clog the pores of the BIAB bag so that I not only had to lift out the bag of moist grains, but also about 3 gallons of wort that came with it. Lots of squeezing then to get the wort out of the bag.
When the bag was pretty much squeezed out I gave it a dunk sparge in a clean FV with 2 kettle-fulls of boiling water plus 1 of cold water. I worked the bag a bit then hauled it out and let it drain / squeezed it out over the boiler and added the sparge water to the boiler, setting this to bring the wort to the boil.
This leaves the boiler with about 5 gallons of wort - some will be lost by evaporation, so during the boil I occasionally replenish it with a kettle full of boiling water. Here's the initial boil:
Once the foaming stopped I added the first of the hops (labelled 60mins). I usually boil for 90 minutes so I did the same this time. Second hops went in with 15 minutes to go, then the whirlfloc tablet at 5 minutes, and at switch-off added the last bag of hops. There's a lot of sitting around waiting during the boil so it was time to pop open a bottle of something to keep me inspired - in this case some of the cider I made last autumn...
At the end of the boil, after adding the last packet of hops I let the boiler stand for 20 minutes or so to allow the hops to do their business, then drained the boiler into the FV. I don't chill the wort as I like the hot wort to finish off sanitising the FV!
Then it's on with the lid and carry it into the house before leaving it to cool naturally to pitching temperature when I added the yeast (Safale US-05) without rehydrating it, just sprinkling it onto the wort. Then carried the FV up to our airing cupboard to ferment. By next morning there was a good krausen so I guess all was well.
OG was 1060 which matched what the kit instructions say, so I guess my mashing technique can't be too bad.
Part of the clean-up crew. Got to do something with the grains...:lol:
I'll update this at bottling time, and again after conditioning.
Firstly, I'm not new to AG, but so far have only done 5 BIABs before, so wouldn't consider myself an expert by any means. The instructions that came with the kit were pretty poor, so I thought I'd just stick to my normal BIAB routine as I've been happy with the results I've had so far.
Picture below shows you what you get when you open the box - a bag of mixed grains, three packets of hops labelled 60mins, 15mins and 0mins which I took to mean the timings from the end of the boil - that'd be a bit confusing for a newbie I think - a packet of yeast and a tablet of whirlfloc. Plus the `instructions'.
Next picture is my boiler at my `workstation'. I just put that in to wind up all those people who spend hours and hours sanitising their entire environment before they start brewing.:lol:
I usually put in about 4 gallons of water to heat up for the mash as the boiler is 30litre and you have to leave room for the grains. I did the same this time but forgot that as it's quite a strong brew there'd be a bigger volume of grains. Luckily by the time I'd added all the grains and stirred them in there was still about half an inch of clearance til the top of the boiler.
I leave the boiler set at 65 so the heater clicks on and off throughout the mash and I occasionally check that the temperature is more or less correct. I mash for 90mins. Then I haul the bag out of the boiler using a rope to hang it over it to drain. This was the only problem I had making the brew - it seemed that something in the grain was fine enough to totally clog the pores of the BIAB bag so that I not only had to lift out the bag of moist grains, but also about 3 gallons of wort that came with it. Lots of squeezing then to get the wort out of the bag.
When the bag was pretty much squeezed out I gave it a dunk sparge in a clean FV with 2 kettle-fulls of boiling water plus 1 of cold water. I worked the bag a bit then hauled it out and let it drain / squeezed it out over the boiler and added the sparge water to the boiler, setting this to bring the wort to the boil.
This leaves the boiler with about 5 gallons of wort - some will be lost by evaporation, so during the boil I occasionally replenish it with a kettle full of boiling water. Here's the initial boil:
Once the foaming stopped I added the first of the hops (labelled 60mins). I usually boil for 90 minutes so I did the same this time. Second hops went in with 15 minutes to go, then the whirlfloc tablet at 5 minutes, and at switch-off added the last bag of hops. There's a lot of sitting around waiting during the boil so it was time to pop open a bottle of something to keep me inspired - in this case some of the cider I made last autumn...
At the end of the boil, after adding the last packet of hops I let the boiler stand for 20 minutes or so to allow the hops to do their business, then drained the boiler into the FV. I don't chill the wort as I like the hot wort to finish off sanitising the FV!
Then it's on with the lid and carry it into the house before leaving it to cool naturally to pitching temperature when I added the yeast (Safale US-05) without rehydrating it, just sprinkling it onto the wort. Then carried the FV up to our airing cupboard to ferment. By next morning there was a good krausen so I guess all was well.
OG was 1060 which matched what the kit instructions say, so I guess my mashing technique can't be too bad.
Part of the clean-up crew. Got to do something with the grains...:lol:
I'll update this at bottling time, and again after conditioning.
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