Questions about Grains and All Grain brewing

[Rukula]

I'm thinking about moving into mini mashes of all grain, I'm familiar with with the basics from kit brewing..
I want to experiment with my own recipes, but I'm wondering about how to do things. So, this is what i think i know, and please do correct me if I'm wrong..

First, you need base malt, which is the grain you mill, and this is what makes the fermentable sugar in the wort.

The other thing you need is specialty grains (crystal malt, chocolate malt etc). These are for color and taste, and will not produce fermentable sugar, and should not be milled.

I'm far from sure if this is correct, but i know how to mash it and make wort from it, so please guide me trough the basics of grains. Again; this will be mini mashes, about 1 gallon, and probably done with the "Brew In A Bag" method.

 

[rich27500]

Find a five gallon recipe divide all ingredients by five. That's it! It's more common to buy crushed grain so you're unlikely to need to mill your own grain. You won't need a massive pot to do those size mashes your best bet is to look at our crazy antics on the back to basics 2 thread. BUT why 1 gallon batches, it's the same effort (actually it took me longer to do the small batch)to do a5 gallon standard brew length

 

[pittsy]

Base grains as you said give you all the sugars etc but are also great on there own , many other malts give you different things such as for dark colours you might use munich 3 or chocolate malt to give that deep colour but too much of these type of grains can overpower the taste , other malts give you a sweet taste (crystal malt)or a caramel flavour (caramunich 1) or head retention (wheat) etc etc http://www.brupaks.com/BRUPAKS%20GRAIN% ... %20WEB.htm

 

[jonewer]

Speciality malts and grains do need to be milled, but most are supplied this way anyway, so dont worry about that.

As a general guide, a pale ale will be 90-100% base malt and/or 5-10% crystal.

 

[Kev888]

Pale malt is usually the main bulk or base malt of a recipe (at least in in british beers) and yes it does normally generate the majority of the fermentable sugars during mashing. Other grains tend to be malted more for their different flavour/colour/body and are usually used in smaller quantities, but they can in some cases contribute also to the fermentables to one degree or another if you mash them properly (they can be just steeped a bit in some cases), so especially if there are reasonable amount of them its worth taking into account.

The 'potential extract' is an indication of what specific gravity you could expect to extract from a grain type if your mash were completely efficient, and is sometimes quoted by means of the gravity you would get from 1lb in 1gallon (though both US or imperial gallons can be used so take care), or in metric Litre Degrees per KG (LDK). Of course you won't get 100% mash efficiency, something like 65% to 85% is more typical even in ag mashes so you'll get less than the full potential, but its an indication of the grain's relative yield.

It varies between manufacturers/maltsters and over the years but theres a table towards the bottom of this page of what can be expected (I just found it in a search as an example; its a bit american and I haven't verified its accuracy). The brewing software people use tends to have such values already plumbed in, or with a bit of effort you can manually calculate the likely gravity you'll get, but in both cases it'll be pretty rough until you know your own efficiency.

And as others have said, its common for us to buy grain pre-crushed. You can indeed buy it uncrushed to mill yourself, but its less commonly available, especially in special malts. The degree of crushing is reasonably important so one argument is that its easier to have done for you, another is that if you know what you're doing (and have a mill) you can customise the crushing by doing it yourself. Personally I'm lazy...

Cheers
kev

 

[Dave1970]

You could try downloading Brewmate and just have a play with what it says the impact of using different grains is. There is better brewing software but Brewmate is fairly simple and more importantly free!
As Rich said, why do 1 gall batches when you can make more beer in the same time? As I found doing the 'back to basics' experiment a 1 gall batch is a lot of time put in for not much beer

 

[Rukula]

About the "you don't have to mill" part i posted..
I do have a small mill.. I think its named "corona" or something, so if i should mill all the grains, its no problem for me to do so.. I just heard somewhere that the base malts are the only thing that should be milled.

The reason for me doing 1 gal batches, is because i love to experiment. If the beer is bad, i have only wasted 1 gal, and if its good, i can always make a 40 pint batch with the same recipe.

From the beer kit days, i had to throw away loads of bottles because i just didn't like the beer. For be this is a good idea, i don't make beer to save money, i make it to make the beer i want, that i cant find in the shop :