All Grain All The Way

Hi friends,

This weekend we hit a major milestone as brewers...we completed our first all grain batch!

We ordered the ingredients a little while ago, and it was finally time to tackle the 10-pound-grain-wonder

The process is almost the same, but differs in that we finally got to use those honking orange sports drink coolers!  Remember us?

So first, we gave the grain mill a bit of a workout by crushing all 10+ pounds of grain

GRR!

While we were doing that, we brought a few gallons of water to a temperature of about 160 degrees to get to a mash temperature of about 154 (the grains are cooler than the water, so when we add the grains, our temperature will go down).  This is a "single temperature infusion" (a/k/a the idiot-proof mash schedule - add water and leave it alone).  Mash schedules can get infinitely more complex, and we'll probably end up with a whole lot more complexity in future batches, but for this one, we wanted to KISS it as much as possible.

Once the water hit our "strike" temperature of about 163, we filled one of those coolers about 3/4 of the way with the hot water.

Commence the Mash!

We looked at our heaping pile of crushed grains, and we looked at the 3/4 of the way filled cooler/mash tun, scratching our heads and wondering/praying if it was going to all fit.

 

Slowly we added the crushed grains to the hot water, gradually making, for lack of a better description, a giant bowl of oatmeal.  Constantly stirring and praying...

 Stirring and praying... 

I have a sudden craving for oatmeal...

Thankfully it all fit! (huzzah!)

We put the lid on and let it sit and steep for one hour.  We ended up pretty close to our initial mash temperature - the mash started about 153, and ended up about 149 by the end of the hour.  Next time we'll heat our strike water a little higher (maybe closer to 170), as we have a better idea about how much heat we'll loose in the mash.


While the mash was resting, we heated up more water for the next step, the sparge.  This water is used to sparge, or "rinse," the sugars from the grains.  We heated this to about 190 degrees or so, because we wanted our sparge water to be about 170-180 when it hit the grain bed.

Why the different temperatures between the mash water and the sparge water?  Good question.  The answer has a lot to do with beer chemistry, and we don't really understand it all that well.  However, we think the answer is that lower temperatures mean more fermentable sugars (sugars the yeast can eat), which means more potential alcohol (do I have your attention now?).  Higher temperatures mean more unfermentable sugars (sugars the yeast cannot eat), but unfermentable sugars help contribute to the "mouthfeel" of the beer (how the beer feels in your mouth - i.e., is the beer watery or more full bodied).

So basically we wanted to strike a balance between having a decent amount of alcohol (so the beer's not overly sweet) and having a solid mouthfeel (so the beer's not too watery).  But I digress... 

Sparge Time

Once the mash rest ended, we began to sparge.  Our first step in the sparge is called the vorlauf (funny German word that means to clarify by recirculating).  This is done before adding any of the sparge water to the grains.  To begin the vorlauf, we opened up the valve on our mash tun and let the wort run into a pitcher.  At first the wort liquid had a lot of grain husks in it, which we do not want to end up in our boil kettle.  That's why we do the vorlauf (Gesundheit) 

We drained off about half a pitcher, and poured the contents back over the grain bed.  We did this three or four times until the liquid started running free of grain husks. 

Then, we drained off the grain-free wort, putting it into our boil kettle. 

Our sweet set up

 For you beer geeks out there (like us!), this is called the "first runnings."  There's a whole lot of history about first runnings, which you can read if you want.  Go ahead.  We'll wait...



And we're back. 

Once the cooler-filled-grain-bed was pretty free of liquid, we added the sparge water.  We did this by filling the cooler almost all the way back up to the top and restirred the grains.  The idea here is to get all of the sugars we created during the hour-long mash into the liquid in the boil.  Why? Because sugar is what yeast eat to make alcohol, and alcohol-free beer is not all that much fun to drink (or make, for that matter).  So, the more sugar we get out of the grains, the more food the yeast have to eat, and the more potential booze we can make.  Genius formula if you ask me.

The process of adding the water in big amounts like this is called "batch sparging."  There are other forms of sparging (i.e., fly sparging), but those can be a bit more complex and require some different equipment.  As much as D loves buying new beer toys, we want to get a few all grain batches under our belt before trying out new sparge methods.

 After letting the sparge water sit for a few minutes in the grains, we vorlaufed (bless you) again, then drained these "second runnings" into the boil kettle, mixing them with the "first runnings."  We continued this pattern of sparging, vorlaufing, and draining into the boil kettle until we hit our boil volume of a little more than 5.25 gallons.

Filling up the boil kettle

Once we had our boil volume, we took our first gravity reading (which measures the amount of sugars in the liquid), and put the pot to the flame (or in our case, glass stove top).

Hop To It

Once the boil started, we proceeded to throw in the hops.  This particular recipe had an active hop schedule.  There were different hops that needed to be added all throughout various times throughout the boil.  In a few weeks, we'll add additional hops for flavor and aroma in a "dry hopping" phase for this brew.  In total, the beer boiled for about an hour, with hops being added at the 40, 30, 20, 10 and 5 minute mark.

The rest of the process was the same, cool down the mixture with the wort chiller, add the yeast, sanitize everything in sight, and let condition! 



Immersion Chiller in Action



 In the interest of full disclosure, a few things to point out:

1) To satisfy our voyeuristic curiosity, we decided that instead of putting this beer in a plastic bucket, we wanted to watch the magic happen, so we put in a glass carboy.

2) Also, we forgot to use a yeast starter this time around since the decision to brew was a bit last minute (a/k/a, "We have a free Sunday for once in our lives, we should probably brew so we can stop looking at that 10 lbs bag of grain on top of the fridge"...or something like that)

Since this particular recipe will result  in a high alcohol by volume beer (darn?), it will be hanging out in the carboy for a few weeks.