Today we did our first all-grain brew, which we did using the Brew in a Bag (BIAB) method of all-grain. We're shooting for a 2-gallon batch of Pumking clone using the recipe we found at Pedal To The Kettle. As expected, lots of lessons learned from our first time with the technique.
The first issue we encountered was with the volume of water for the mash. Given evaporation, boil off, and grains soaking up water, the ideal starting water for our batch would have been about 4 gallons. But, with just a 5-gallon kettle and 6+ lbs of grain to fit in, we decided to just go with 3 gallons of water for the mash instead. If we want to do full volume mashing for even just a 2 gallon batch, we're going to need something bigger than a 5 gallon kettle.
Temperature-wise, the mash seemed to go just fine. We started with water at 160 and then, after adding room-temp grains, the mash started at 152. Even without any insulation for the kettle, the mash only dropped down to about 149 over the course of an hour. We could have added a little more heat to keep it in the 150s, but I think 149 should be just fine for starch conversion.
The hardest part of the day was lautering with the brew bag. When we pulled the bag out of the kettle it felt like we were pulling all of the liquid out with it. We tried setting it in a colander to let the water drain out, but the bag with all the grains was so wide that wort started spilling out over the sides, making a mess of the stove top. We ended up taking a huge bowl, wider than the kettle, and setting the bag in that to let it drain. Amy also squeezed the bag to get more of the liquid out, but with all the hot water in there, that wasn't easy either. In the end, we got to a little over 2.5 gallons of wort from the mash. Not a ton of water loss but it took a lot of work to get there. In the future we need some sort of strainer solution that makes it a lot easier to drain the water out of the bag.
To get to our 3.5 gallon pre-boil volume, we added almost a gallon of water to the kettle after mashing. In retrospect, we should have sparged this water through the grains to get some more of the sugar.
The rest of the brew day was pretty straightforward. The only issue we ran into was having enough wort to reach our 2.4 gallon batch volume and still have enough left for a gravity reading. The 5 cups left over in the kettle was all trub, so we ended up pulling wort from the primary, doing the reading, then dumping it back into the primary. Next time I need to calculate in more than 0.3 gallons for trub loss so that we have more wort to play with when transferring to primary.
The original gravity came out to 1.062 - way below our target of 1.080. It looks like we have some work to do on our BIAB efficiency. One thing we could have done was sparge the added water through the grains to get some more sugar. We also could have done a finer crush on the grains - perhaps by having the brew store double-mill the grains if they can't just configure the mill differently. Another little thing we could do is use a mash pH stabilizer to increase efficiency.
So the two big issues of the day were draining the brew bag (lautering) and brew efficiency. Hopefully we can get those worked out for future BIAB brews. I still think the technique could work out well and give us all the advantages of all-grain without adding all that much time to the brew day compared to extract brewing. And hopefully despite the issues, we still end up with a tasty pumpkin beer in a month or so.
---> [ Pumking Racking ]
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