I'd planned to use my urn to do the BIAB but he suggested using his sous vide immersion pump and heater for the mash instead.
(For those of you who don't know, sous vide is a cooking method whereby food is sealed in a plastic bag then immersed in a water bath and held at temperatures much lower than normal cooking temperatures. Cooking is slower - sometimes taking days. If you've ever watched MasterChef you have probably seen food cooked sous vide. More information on Wikipedia if you're interested.)
We set the sous vide heater/recirculator to 65C and the only thing we had to worry about during the mash was giving everything a stir every now and then.
As an aside, here is something that should cause concern to a few AG brewers: The sous vide machine is calibrated regularly to make sure it maintains the correct temperature. One of the other guys and I both had the same model of hand-held digital thermometer, which cost about $30. His was a few months old and mine is two-and-a-half years old. His read about 2C lower than the sous vide heater and mine was about a degree. Time for a new, better quality thermometer for me.
The pre-boil gravity was only out by a point, so I reckon that the exercise was a great success.
This is a close-up of the sous-vide contraption in the the brew pot. We had to use a pot with a large diameter because the other pots at the pub were quite tall and the sous vide machine wouldn't reach the liquid. We also needed to stretch the bag across the pot to make sure its bottom wasn't dragged into the inlet of the sous vide machine and onto the heating elements. The tea towel is for a bit of insulation.
Probably the only hitch was the amount of foam that was produced, which you can see well in this picture. The Braumeister is in the background, mashing away.
The lads on brew day.
The steam ale that we mashed using the sous vide machine was boiled on the stove in the kitchen. Because of the large diameter of the pot the boil-off was a lot greater than I'd planned so we needed to top it up several times. Thankfully, one of the guys had brought his refractometer. I've gotta get me one of them!
Both brews were chilled overnight in the pub's coolroom and yeast is to be pitched this afternoon.
Having a commercial dishwasher on hand meant I could sit back and have a few more beers a little earlier than otherwise!
Cheers,
Oliver
