First Full Boil

[hopshead]

This weekend I will do my first full boil with my turkey fryer. I have been making beers using the partial mash method from the recent byo article. Now that I am graduating to full boils I need some advice on how to accomplish this. Specifically, I had assumed I will get the full volume of water in the kettle and bring my water temp up to mashing temp and ladle out the water needed to go in my 2 gallon rubbermaid mash tun. Then what? do I continue heating the water to sparge temp? If so, should I ladle the sparge water into my old brew pot and then collect the first wort from the cooler, then batch sparge? How do you guys do partial mash with full 5 gallon boils?

[BrewDog]

You really have to use a 2nd boil pot for sparge water. The brew pot will be receiving wort in stages from the batch sparges.

Make sure you have a wort chiller, too. Full boils take absolutely forever to cool down if you don' t have one.

Good luck!

[Carl Spakler]

Originally posted by BrewDog

Make sure you have a wort chiller, too. Full boils take absolutely forever to cool down if you don' t have one.

Good luck! [/B]

I've found even boiling ~2+ gallons of water and adding cold tap water still takes way too long!! I got a wort chiller for Christmas!!! I am looking forward to testing it out. :)

[brazilhead]

It´s generally a good idea to test wort chillers with just water before you do the real thing and that´s a good opportunity to do a "Corky Douche" on the copper. (Do a search with those words on this site if you don´t know what this is.) Good luck!

[hopshead]

Not sure how this beer will turn out but I wanted to let you all know what I tried this weekend. I had a large nylon bag and used it to put 4 pounds of crushed grain in. I filled the pot up with about 5.75 gallons of water and fired up the burner. Got the water temp to 164 and put the nylon bag in. I stirred the grains inside the bag really well and then tied it off. Too my surpise the water temp did not go down much at all, 162!. So I hurried up and got the water hose over and dumped in cold water till temp was 154. My guess is at most the grains were in the 162 degree range for about two minutes. Then after 45 min. I cranked up the burner and got the temp to 170 and held it there for about 4 min. Then I pulled out the bag and let it drain into the pot for about 3 minutes until the stream was breaking up. Then I reduced the flame really low and added the liquid malt extract. What do you guys think about this partial mash procedure? I know its not text book, but just wondering.

[BrewDog]

If you used 5.75 gals in a 4 lb mash, you used too much water.
You should have used around 1 to 1.25 quarts of water per lb of grain, so 5.75 QUARTS would have been correct. That would explain the lack of a temp drop, for certain.

Keep the beer. Don't throw it away. Let it go all the way to completion and taste it then. The biggest risk here for you is astringency. Depending on your palate, you might not even taste it. I don' think 2 mins at 162 will be a problem.

Next time, keep close attention to your volume and temps. You'll do just fine.

HTH-

[Mill Rat]

I'd say you did alright. Not perfect, but you did what you set out to do, more or less, and you learned a bunch of stuff that you won't do again with the specific equipment you use, because there's really no other way to learn about how to use your equipment. We've all been there, often multiple times as we upgrade our breweries.

[dparsons]

You shouldn't get astringency at 162. Its high enough to break down the enzymes that do the conversion, but I wouldn't expect 2 minutes to be enough to do this completely. Like Mill Rat said, you did fine. You got the flavor from the grains in your beer and you got some extraction from the grain.

[HogieWan]

Originally posted by dparsons
You shouldn't get astringency at 162.

it's not the temperature that will give the astringency, but the volume of water

[hopshead]

I don't understand how the higher volume of water will give you astringincy. How does that work?

[vw addict]

Originally posted by hopshead
I don't understand how the higher volume of water will give you astringincy. How does that work?
overextraction. It's like brewing coffee with not enough grounds.

[HogieWan]

the tannins in the grain husks is what causes the astringency. They aren't soluble in mashing conditions (low pH, little water), but too much water, too high temps, or too high pH will cause them to go into solution giving you astringent, hazy beer

[MichaelM]

Originally posted by HogieWan
the tannins in the grain husks is what causes the astringency. They aren't soluble in mashing conditions (low pH, little water), but too much water, too high temps, or too high pH will cause them to go into solution giving you astringent, hazy beer

Thats why when I am just steeping the grains I basicaly minimash them useing the typical 1-1.25 or so quarts of water per pound of grain. then rinse them out to get the yummy goodness out of them.

Use my last brew I did saterday as an example:

1# of malted 2 row
1# of caramunich
.5# crystal 60

put the grains in a large grainbag and put that into a small cooler(tall lunchbox type cooler prolly holds maybe 3 gallons).
Heated water to 175 degrees and added 3 quarts to grain in cooler (hit temp of 155 perfectly) and agitated and stirred the grains to make sure they where all nice and wet. left alone for 60 minutes temp never dropped below 153.

After an hour heated 2 gallons of water to 180 dumped into cooler to bring grain temp up to 170 basicaly just swished and stirred the grains to disolve as much sugars as possible and then pulled the grainbag out and let drain into the cooler then basicaly just racked the wort into the brewkettle(racked instead of dumped to try to leave behind as much junk since I couldnt vorlaugh(sp) it like a real minimash)

repeated the last step two more times with 1.5 gallons of water heated to 170 degrees .... last time the wort was barely sweet and light in color.

added my 2#pounds of amber DME and the 3.3# of amber LME and another gallon of water in the brewpot to make up for most the boiloff and lit the fire lol...


My gravity reading came out at 1.055 which would mean I came out around 75+% efficiency doing my hacked together batchsparged minimashed/steep(beersmith says 80% but I am not buying it lol)

The above was MUCH easier to do then to actualy type I promise... other then the more exact heating of the water for the strikes and multiple rinses its no more work then just steeping and draining out the grains.

[dparsons]

Originally posted by HogieWan
the tannins in the grain husks is what causes the astringency. They aren't soluble in mashing conditions (low pH, little water), but too much water, too high temps, or too high pH will cause them to go into solution giving you astringent, hazy beer

Hmmm. My first couple batches were extract with flavoring grains. I put the 1-2 lbs. of grain in 6 gallons of water at 168 F (as per the instructions) and never noticed any astringency in either the Pale Ale or the Nut Brown I brewed this way. The water pH was ~7.8.

I know its a combination of pH and temperature. I'd certainly like to know what the relationship is better.