Today we brewed our first full grain beer. We procured the following barley from
Bull City Homebrew:
- 6 lbs. American two-row,
- 6 oz. English Crystal (55L),
- 2.5 oz. Roasted Barley.
Now this is our first foray into full grain brewing and it quickly became evident we hadn't given this issue out full consideration. As such there was a few issues. First, the amount of equipment that it takes to do this properly. Second, given we didn't have some specialized equipment, how we were going to achieve a full grain brew with what we had.
First things first. Brewing a good full grain beer involves a 3-step process called lautering. Lautering involves mash out, recirculation and sparging and is usually done with a Lauter tun. A Lauter tun basically has a false bottom allowing the grains to be mixed directly into the warm water and also aides recirculation - the process of removing the water from the bottom of the Lauter tun and returning it back into the pot at the top. Well, we don't have a Lauter Tun so we improvised.
The improvisation involves keeping the grains held in a permeable bag and adding them into our boil pot which we'd pre-heated to 150F. This means that our recirculation was going to consist of us stirring this bag with a metal spoon in an attempt to keep the temperature and concentration of the mash constant.
We also didn't have a fancy gravity-fed hot water reservoir to do a proper sparging. So, improvising again, we had a separate smaller boil pot (our sparging pot) which we heated the water to 170F. After an hour of the grains in the mash tun we removed the grain bag and placed it into the sparging pot and rinsed the grains until the liquid from the grain bag ran relatively clear.
From here we then used the sparging water (now wort) to give the grain bag one final rinse as we transferred the the wort into our boil pot (the original mash tun).
Then, everything runs back to how we're used to doing things when we use a kit. Add our bittering, flavor, and aroma hops over the next hour before chilling the wort and transferring to the primary fermenter. What will become of this "MacGyver Ale"? We'll know in a few weeks time.
All and all, we're excited by the move to full grain, as it allows us more control over our malt profile compared to using a kit. There are several improvements on the equipment side that we'll need to fix before trying this again but nothing insurmountable.
For our hops, we tried to keep things tame (by our hop-head standards). We started with 1.25 oz of Centennial hops (alpha acid = 9.2%) at the start of the boil for bittering, and a mixture of Cascade (alpha acid = 6.4%) and Amarillo (alpha acid = 8.2%) hops at 50 and 55 minutes for flavor and aroma. Initial gravity = 1.052. In the carboy, there is a lot of sediment, but the color looks good and it smells amazing.
Hooray beer.