Craziest Home Brewing Story
Always get bigger, you need it later. you should be able to mash a 5 gallon batch in the 5 gallon cooler no problem. Forget about how much water you need, or how many quarts to use on a full moon on a Sunday on a leap year, it's not real world applications. After you brew for a while, and get used to your equipment, you won't even worry about it. For the African Amber, your lookink for a medium viscosity mash, so like loose oatmeal, a heavy mash is like regular oatmeal, and a thin mash is like watery, or steeping oatmeal.
I have a 10 gallon Gott round cooler, and i've had a 30lb grain bill in there before. I personally like the round coolers, better grain bed, but to each his own. Half the people on here think i'm a moron anyway, so what the hell do I know. Ha ha.
But what if it's only a quarter moon? And it's not a leap year? Then how much water do I use?
I guess I'm one of those anal-retentive types when it comes to numbers and equations or anything else mathematical or scientific. I need to RDWHAHB. Sometimes it is good to step back, quit looking at the trees and see the forest.
Guess I'll stick with my 5 gallon cooler for a while. Unless I start having efficiency problems. Which is something I am clueless about. At this point all I am trying to do is hit my temperatures and OG numbers. One of these days I will have to figure out how to compute efficiency, but for now I figure if I hit my temps, gravity and volume everything else will take care of itself.
I think 48 qt coolers are the best way to go. mainly because that is what size cooler I have. The 5 gallon one should work ok, some brews you will have to do a thicker mash with and then sparge an extra time, because you can't fit enough water in there with that much grain. but it will work.
I also didn't like how the ss braid kept moving and kinking up on me so I got a bazooka screen. Other people swear by the ss braid. as long as it works for you, do it.
I'm not crazy about the SS screen either, it does kink and move around. Didn't know what a bazooka screen was so I googled it. Looks like a better solution. Think I'll stick with what I have for now. Starting to get raised eyebrows from SWMBO.
My first all grain brew was a kind of Rube Goldberg brew in a bag ordeal, but when I got done I tasted the grain and they were kind of bland. After this last batch the grain was pretty sweet, so I ended up leaving a lot of sugars in the grain. I'll just have to figure out how to manage my water to get good extraction with what I have.
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