First All Grain Brew

Methods, ingredients, advice and equipment specific to all-grain (mash), partial mash (mini mash) and "brew in a bag" (BIAB) brewing.

First All Grain Brew

Postby bilgerat » Thursday Feb 02, 2012 11:39 pm

Well I finally got around to making my first batch of AG today, a Kolsch

My recipe

4.5kg Pilsner Malt
250g Rice Hulls
400g Wheat Malt
300g Munich1 Malt

45g Tettnanger at start of boil
30g Tettnanger at 5min before end of boil
10g Tettnanger at flame out

I used 15 litres mash water at 80C which resulted in 66C in my mash tun once the 5.5kg of grain was in.

My march pump wasnt up to the job of circulating water through my coil in the HLT so I drained a few litres off the mashtun and heated it in a saucepan to maintain temperature , a pain in the bum but it worked, mash temp was pretty steady between 62 - 68 C.

Flysparged with 20 litres water at 80C

The wort chiller worked a treat in the esky of ice.OG was about 1042

I used a packet of Nottingham Danstar dry yeast and chucked it in the fermenter fridge at 25C, will wait and see the result.
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bilgerat
 
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Re: First All Grain Brew

Postby squirt in the turns » Sunday Feb 12, 2012 6:31 pm

Nice one bilgerat, hopefully you nailed it.

Any idea what the issue with the pump was? I'm about to invest in a March pump... I was under the impression that they're pretty much the de-facto standard for this stuff and are generally awesome.
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Re: First All Grain Brew

Postby bilgerat » Sunday Feb 12, 2012 10:11 pm

I eventually sorted out that the trouble I had was with the nitto snap on hose fittings I was using which were crap, they are actually made for air hose not for pumping water with floaty bits in it, I ended up connecting to my HLT etc with just a hose and a hose clamp, things worked much better after ditching the air hose fittings, I tried the snap on fittings for ease of attaching hoses to the pump and my heating coil in the HLT and to my wort chiller coil etc.

The pumps are not self priming so you must make sure there is no air in the suction hose, once primed the pump works fine its just that with my first AG I had enough to worry about without dealing with a pump that wasnt pumping, I now know why, I made another brew today and the pump worked ok.
I have also bought a small 12v pump from gryphon brewing as a back up, I havent used it yet but at $37 it will be interesting to see how it performs??
I paid $330 for the march pump.
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