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First AG Post Mortem
So I did my first all-grain batch yesterday and just about everything that could go wrong did. I made the BKB Community Oatmeal Stout recipe. I'm trying to do this all-grain upgrade on the cheap so I'm starting with Papazian's zapap tun design: 2 5 gal buckets nested together, with lots of holes in the bottom of the upper one. I cut a hole in the side of the lower bucket and stuck in the tap from my bottling bucket to handle the runoff.
My first lesson is that that design can't handle big grain bills like this (13.75 lbs including rice hulls). I got my mash water up to strike temp and poured it in, then added the grain, practically filling it to the top. Then I tried to stir it to mix it up and water sloshed out where the buckets met. Bit of a mess.
I had it wrapped in a yoga mat as insulation with two folded towels on the lid and that worked really well. For the whole mash time it lost maybe 5 degrees tops. Even so it took a good 90 minutes for an iodine test to show anything close to complete conversion.
Then came the runoff. I infused with some boiled water to get it up to mash out temp, couldn't add as much as my calcs called for cos of the space issue. I vorlaufed and got really clear runoff. Until my sparge stuck. I mean totally stuck. I had to stir it and move the grain bed around a lot to get any more liquid out. I nervously added half my sparge water and let it sit. The inner bucket was orange and the lower one white so I could see there was no liquid coming down into the space between. I tried stirring again and could never get it to run.
So I threw all rules of good practice out the window and improvised. I poured all the grain and wort into a 7 gal bucket with the rest of my sparge water, stirred and then poured thru a strainer into another bucket in stages, letting the grain drip drain. Eventually I got 5 gals of wort separated and poured it back and forth thru the strainer trying to get the last bits out. I'm sure tons of air got in as I did this. All the stirring probably bought me some tannins as well. I checked OG (1.032 @ 100F = 1.040) and topped up to 6.5 gals in my kettle.
What I put on the boil was dark and cloudy. I figured what the hell, I'm not gonna just pour it out in the yard, might as well see what comes of it. So I finished up and we'll see how it works out. Hopefully it'll clear in the fermenter. It's in there puttering away now.
I'm wondering why the sparge stuck. The recipe includes a lot of oatmeal and flaked barley but I put in half a # of rice hulls, which should have helped. And stirring should have helped that anyway, wouldn't it? When I looked at my inner bucket afterward a lot of the holes were plugged up. I have hundreds of holes of varying sizes, would they be more likely to plug if they were large or small?
After all of that I ended up with 5.5 gals of post-boil wort at 1.040, which isn't that far below style for stout, but my efficiency calcs show a whopping 45% efficiency. Yippee. (13.25# x 37pts per #) / 5.5 gals = 89; I got 5.5 gals at 1.040; 40/89 = 45%. Is that calc correct?
I also felt like I used a ton of propane over the 5 1/2 hr day. It was pretty cold here (40s F) so maybe that made it worse, but how much propane do you frequent brewers go thru?
Anyone have any idea what this is going to taste like?
If I can convince my wife that I'm not a hopeless incompetent I'll try another AG session in May. I'd been hoping to do the BKB Saison but that's go a big grain bill too. I might have to invest the money in a cooler tun.
Lee wrote:
After all of that I ended up with 5.5 gals of post-boil wort at 1.040,
but how much propane do you frequent brewers go thru?
Anyone have any idea what this is going to taste like?
If I can convince my wife that I'm not a hopeless incompetent I'll try another AG session in May. I'd been hoping to do the BKB Saison but that's go a big grain bill too. I might have to invest the money in a cooler tun.
Hey with that grain bill I bet you still get delicious stout, great improv too. I wouldn't worry about sloshing it around, you will drink it too fast I bet for HSA to be noticable, unless you planned on bottling it for long term.
I can make a 20# tanl last about 4-5 batches, but I do cheat a lot. I usually need 10 gal of strike water for a 30# bill, the night before I fill my keggle w/ 7 gal of water, then put another 3.5 gallons (old brewpot) and 7 gallons (another old brewpot) on the stove 1/2 hour before I start my brewday. When I fire up the keggle, I dump in the 3.5 gallons of preheated (boil) to my cold keggle, now I can bring the whole amount up to strike in about 25 min. (.5 gallon stays in due to keggle bottom.)
After the strrike water has been transferred to tun, I pour the approaching boil other 7 gallons I had on the stove along with another 3.5 gallons that I refilled and re-heat while the strike water was coming up.back into the keggle. This I use to heat the HERMS during the mash period, and then use that as my sparge water already heated. The only other time I need the burner is for the boil which I keep at a low roll.
Last the makeshift tun I bet will work if re-tooled and dialed in, but if you want a headache free brewday, may want to break down and buy/build a capable tun or cooler system.
Good luck!
I am also currently using a zappap style tun. The one brew I mashed in it though was a complete failure. I have had much better luck mashing in my 8g brew kettle as I can control the temp much better and much more exactly than I coul by trying to add doses of hot water to my tun. That and I can mash out w/o having to add water. I just simply turn the burner on and stir. I too started out w/ the 5g bucket set-up but up sized to 7g buckest for more room. My 5g ordeal was a series of stuck sparges because I had to have the mash way to thick because I didn't have room. Next brew projet will be converting a 55qt chest cooler into a mash tun so I can handle larger grain bills more efficiently. Best of luck in the future. Just think, if it were easy everybody would be brewing beer. Think of the hops shortage then!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks. I redid my efficiency calc using only the grains (my original calc included several pounds of oats and such) and the result is 60% so that's not TOO bad for a first attempt.
I'm also on the lookout for a cooler to convert. I wanted to try the cheaper alternative first. Plus I'm the least handy guy I can imagine so the idea of putting together one of those manifold things kinda scares me.
I'm curious: using your brew kettle as your mash tun, how did you sparge/lauter? Pour it all through a strainer like I did?
I mashed and mashed out in the kettle. Had sparge water heated and at the ready in another kettle. transffered the mashed contents to the zappap. Rinsed the kettle and prceded to sparge.
Racked to secondary yesterday. It had a very vigorous primary, burbling away like crazy. It tested at 1.010, which is fine by me, and it smelled and tasted good when I sampled it. We're out of town for ten days for school vacation starting next friday so I'll leave it in secondary til the end of the month before bottling.
Thanks to all who chimed in to reassure me. Results aren't final yet, but it looks like this wasn't as disastrous as I had thought.
I am going to start figuring my effeciency @ 55-60% just to be on the safe side. I'd wrather have to dilute my wort back then have to scramble and add malt extract to get the OG up to target.
I just did my first AG yesterday, a wheat. I learned a few additional lessons:
1.) Do everything, mashing, heating water, the boil, all on the same floor of your house, water is heavy.
2.) Use a pitcher to dump the first few gallons of water if you dont have a spigot, water is heavy.
3.) If you fail to abide by number 2, and you spill hot sparge water on your foot, taking your sock off will stop the burning faster!
Also a question:
Thanks. I redid my efficiency calc using only the grains (my original calc included several pounds of oats and such) and the result is 60% so that's not TOO bad for a first attempt.
Do you not include Flaked wheat and Flaked Barley in calculating efficiencies?
Sorry, I haven't checked this thread in a while. I read that you should only consider your malts when calculating efficiency. The other stuff (oatmeal, flaked barley, etc) will not convert at all so will not contribute to the extraction. They steep in the mash water and add to the wort but do not convert, and it's the conversion you are calculating efficiency for: what percentage of the total potential sugar in the malts are you actually converting from starch?
Update on the beer itself: I tasted my first sample of the oatmeal stout last night. It was good, but very thin. With the oatmeal in the recipe I expected a much bigger mouthfeel. Could this have come from mashing at too low a temp? That would reduce the amount of unfermentables and result in a thinner beer, no? My thermomenter showed me right on 155F for the whole mash but maybe it's wrong. I also had little head retention, which i thought crystal was supposed to aid in. The recipe had .5# crystal in it.
Hoping to do my second AG batch this weekend, if I can get my cooler converted in time. I don't want to go thru the same sparging nightmare as with this batch. BKB 2007 Summer Community Saison.
Lee wrote:
My first lesson is that that design can't handle big grain bills like this (13.75 lbs including rice hulls). I got my mash water up to strike temp and poured it in, then added the grain, practically filling it to the top. Then I tried to stir it to mix it up and water sloshed out where the buckets met. Bit of a mess.
I had it wrapped in a yoga mat as insulation with two folded towels on the lid and that worked really well. For the whole mash time it lost maybe 5 degrees tops. Even so it took a good 90 minutes for an iodine test to show anything close to complete conversion.
Then came the runoff. I infused with some boiled water to get it up to mash out temp, couldn't add as much as my calcs called for cos of the space issue. I vorlaufed and got really clear runoff. Until my sparge stuck. I mean totally stuck. I had to stir it and move the grain bed around a lot to get any more liquid out. I nervously added half my sparge water and let it sit. The inner bucket was orange and the lower one white so I could see there was no liquid coming down into the space between. I tried stirring again and could never get it to run.
I'm wondering why the sparge stuck. The recipe includes a lot of oatmeal and flaked barley but I put in half a # of rice hulls, which should have helped. And stirring should have helped that anyway, wouldn't it? When I looked at my inner bucket afterward a lot of the holes were plugged up. I have hundreds of holes of varying sizes, would they be more likely to plug if they were large or small?
I also felt like I used a ton of propane over the 5 1/2 hr day. It was pretty cold here (40s F) so maybe that made it worse, but how much propane do you frequent brewers go thru?
I just brewed my first two all grain batches back to back (dosen't leave yourself much room for trial and error!), and I also used the zapap tun with great results, but I think I did a few things that might make it work well.
First, I mashed in my 5gal. kettle on my stovetop, making it a snap to maintain temp. After conversion I poured my mash into the tun, but I first poured some of my sparge water into the tun until it was above the false bottom, that way when I added the mash it kind of floated above the bottom.
Second, when I sparged, I didn't do a normal batch sparge and drain it, refill it, stir it and drain it again, and I havent bought a sparge arm yet, so I used a pyrex measuring cup to slowly add sparge water to constantly keep the water level just above the grain. I guess that would be considered a fly sparge? Either way it never got stuck on either batch.
As far as wort coming out between the buckets, yeah, I learned that the hard way too. Worse yet, my first batch was a honey wheat so you have a lb. of honey which means less grain, so it didn't leak on the first batch, but when I got to the phat tire I made a mess. One thing I am going to try is using my bottling bucket as the outer bucket (it's one of the bigger beer buckets that holds 7gal. or maybe 7.4) and the inner 5gal of the original zapap(which I believe is a little more than 5) and get something keep the inner bucket 1in. off of the bottom (which eliminates alot of that space I had to accomidate for as described above) and that should hold everything. I know it I could just build a cooler tun but I have a sanke keg that I am turning into a mash/lauter tun with a false bottom, a shiny valve and maybe a pump to recirculate and transfer with so I have deemed the cooler tun unneccessary for my ambitions.
As far as burning alot of propane/moving large volumes of water around, here's how I killed two birds with one stone; turn your water heater up as high as it will go. I get water out of the tap at 167 deg.! That means burning less fuel(and time) trying to heat up water.
This is only to tell you how I was able to make it work for me but I am far from a brewmaster, so take my advice with a grain of salt and anybody who sees anything wrong with what I am saying please don't hesitate to comment and set me straight. After all, these two may be my first all grains, but they only bring my total number of brews under my belt to 5! Proost!
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