All Grain #1

Beer eye for the VB guy

My first go at all grain. My three previous brews were partial mashes and I have been making incremental improvements to the equipment.

Updates

Well the brew has been tasted by my friends at the local brew club (Melbourne Brewers) and got the thumbs up.

The label refers to the amount of attenuation (only about 50%), the yeast is good for 75%. I have pasted some comments from a few people far more experienced than I on what the reasons for this might be.

I was a bit brash and added some "fermentation modifier" to the brew when it was clear that it wasn't going to go below 1.020. This apparently is a marketing name for enzymes that convert starches to sugar, which the yeast can then convert to alcohol, making for a dry brew.

Well now it is dry, can't say exactly what the SG is because of the head on the sample but it is lower. My thoughts at kegging were that it wasn't too dry, in fact quite refreshing.

28-Apr-2004 it tastes fine!. I wouldn't drink great quantities of it though, its not that kind of beer.

28-Jul-2004 Wins intra club open comp out of 16 beers.

Recipe

As always, you need a recipe. My "standard" is an APA but since I have a few of these in the fridge, I wanted to do something a bit different so I attempted a Wit. Also a colleague at work was interested in brewing the same style so we chased down the ingredients between us.

Only time will tell if this was a little ambitious - if you want to be conservative you probably want to minmise the number of variables you change and being my first AG batch keeping to a familiar style/recipe might have made more sense. But as they say, "life's too short", I can come back and do an APA anytime.

The recipe is based on one contributed by Andrew Clark (to craftbrewers.org I believe), I say based on because someone committed the recipe to memory and came home from the HBS a bit short on torrified wheat

0.30 kg Rice Hulls
2.75 kg Pale Ale Malt
1.50 kg Wheat, Torrified
1.00 kg Wheat Malt, Ger
25.00 gm Saaz N.Z [8.5%] (60 min)
20.00 gm Coriander Seed (Boil 5.0 min) Misc
25.00 gm Orange Peel, Bitter (Boil 5.0 min) Misc
WYeast 3944 - 1 litre starter.

The "secret ingredients". Not a can opener in sight.

Torrified wheat looks a bit like ordinary wheat but it has been heat treated somehow and it is not nearly so crunchy as raw wheat. Because it hasn't been malted, it doesn't have any of its own enzymes to convert starch into fermentable sugars (it has no diastatic power). Apparently the other malted grains come with more than enough to convert it so it has to be mashed with them.

Ok, torrified wheat does need to be crushed, it came to me uncrushed and so I had to improvise with a piece of 4x2. I have the last laugh, see RollerMill.

Yeast Starter

The yeast came to me in a stubbie, my mate from work had kindly cultured up some from the original smack pack. The day before I chucked it into 1 litre of sterile water and 100 g DME.

This yeast is pretty vigorous and didn't like being confined to the starter bottle I was using. On the morning of the brewday I put it in the fridge to cool and settle, I like to pour off some of the starter liquid and pitch the slurry.

Mash

I have no idea why this is called mashing but I reckon the bit where you beat the crap out of some grain with a 4x2 must come pretty close to qualifying for "mashing". The mash tun is identical to the one shown in partial mash #3.

The calculations here are no different to those of partial mashing. You aim for a certain volume of wort with a certain gravity. You know you are going to lose some to boiloff and stuff in the bottom of the brewpot etc. The difference is you will boil the whole lot and try to avoid having to make up for missing fermentables by adding malt extract (all grain => no extract).

I was aiming for 23 litres in the fermenter.
I was expecting around 6-7 litres of losses (but not really sure). So lets say I aim for 30 litres.
I planned a batch sparge and was aiming for half the runnoff from mash water and the other half from sparging (not exactly sure why you aim for that but nevermind). Nominally that is 15 litres mash and 15 litres sparge.
However, each kg of grain soaks up around a litre of water.
My grain bill was 5.5 kg
So my mash volume goes up to 20.5 litres (15 + 5.5).

Also there are temperature requirements for mashing. I was planning on keeping it quite simple so I aimed for 68°C for 60 minutes. This recipe contains quite a bit of wheat and so a protein rest apparently might have been beneficial.

The esky and the grain soak up heat so you can't just toss in 22.5 litres of water at 68°C and expect to hit that temp. I actually decided to add 15 litres @ 80°C and then right near the end, add the 5.5 litres of boiling water as a "mashout".

This picture shows the grain bed after draining the mash water. I was running pretty close to capacity of the Esky (cooler) and it turns out that the Esky is not water tight where the handle hinges are attached (you can see the white disk on the far wall). Luckily it wasn't pouring out, wort is pretty sticky and I don't think the missus would appreciate it all over the kitchen floor.

Actually she came in later and said "what's that stuff on the floor?". I thought I was sprung bad and just looked at her all innocent like and said "what stuff?". It turns out that "milling" the torrified wheat sent bits all over the kitchen - nothin' she couldn't fix with a vacuum cleaner - phew.

The runoff was flowing quite fast, maybe too fast. It was certainly faster than my last partial mash and my efficiency ended up being quite a bit lower (60% compared with 75%). Hence my earlier comments about not changing too many things at once. The good news is I didn't have a stuck sparge. It took about 15 minutes to drain including recirculating the first litre or two back into the esky until the wort clears.

Sparge

After running off the mash water, I put in another 15 litres at 85°C and stirred it up.

After letting it settle I drained out this lot, again taking about 15 minutes. The picture above is after I have already drained some so you can see that a 26 litre esky like this is probably a bit on the small side. The liquid level is above the handle hinges and wort is dribbling down the handles onto the kitchen bench and floor.

$/!\$ I have decided that this esky is too small so one of the improvements being made for my second all grain is a bigger cooler.

You can see it coming out quite fast here.

I ended up with only 25 litres of wort so my measuring looks like it was a bit out. The grain absorption calcs were ok though. I weighed the esky dry and also after the sparge.

Boiling and Cooling

Well apart from the fact that my stove will only maintain a wussy boil (hardly what I would describe as "rolling"), the boiling was pretty uneventful.

Not only did I fall short on the volume, the SG of the wort was on the light side, at only 1.042 (you need to cool it to room temp before taking a reading). I was very tempted to add some DME but then I could hardly call this an AG batch if I did. In any case, the target OG for the Wit apparently starts at 1.045 and after the boil I was up to 1.044 so I decided to keep it "all grain".

At the end of the boil it is good to cool the wort quickly to pitching temperature. Here you can see the immersion chiller. This gets it from boiling to about 25°C in around 15 minutes - you can go lower if you are prepared to wait.

I ended up with only 21 litres in the fermenter. This doesn't pose any problems, it is just surprising what losses do occur.

Although nothing to do with all grain per se, this time I decided to strap the temperature bulb from the thermostat directly to the fermenter. Given that this yeast appears to be fairly active, this is an attempt to reduce that initial temperature rise due to fermentation (fermentation is exothermic, it gives off heat). See TemperatureControl for more detail.

And here is one I prepared earlier. The most important part.

Comments from other brewers

Andrew Gosbell wrote: I use a near identical setup and batch sparge method for mashing with good results. The braided SS works so well - only need to run off about 1L and its clear as. I have been getting efficiencies of more than 75%. These changes might help you improve your efficiency:

use a fine crush and toss in a scoop of rice hulls to help the grain bed form during sparging (You can get big bags of rice hulls from VermontFuel for about $8/bag)
add around 1tspn gypsum (Ca - sulphate) to (soft) Melb water so that the Ca concn is above 50ppm in the liquor ensuring that mash pH will be in the right range
Mashing for 90min+ or at least use an iodine starch test before mash out.
Raise the mash temp to 72-75oC for 10min mash out, then begin sparge.

AndrewQLD wrote on a.h.b:

mash temp was definately too high, the recipe calls for a mash temp of 65c with yours at 68c it was producing a lot of unfermentable dextrins. At that temp I would expect your final gravity after fermentation to be up in the 1.016 to 1.018 range
I think that perhaps the old 4x2 just was'nt quite up to standard and there was alot of coarse grain that would not have converted properly as well.
I usually mash in at a ratio of 3:1, 3lt water for each kilo of grain, However with this recipe I take that up to around 3.5lt per kilo of grain. The thinner mash also allows for better conversion of fermentable sugars giving you a lower final gravity after fermentation.

The first and the last items taken together would certainly have contributed to the high terminal gravity.