Sunday, October 21, 2012

Brew in a Bag Session 2

I did my second brew in a bag session today.  It was only four hours from the time I started heating my strike water till my my 65 degree F wort was transferred to a carboy and I finished cleaning up.  I did cut my boil time to 45 minutes.  If that doesn't lead to any dms  issues, I may just shorten up my normal boil time (I usually don't have a 60 minute hop addition anyway).

This batch may have given me an issue with efficiency (only 68%), but I may have messed up my measurement by drawing a sample from near the top of my kettle while I was chilling.  (I usually draw a sample at the end of my boil before everything gets stratified.)  My first brew in a bag batch had a 76% efficiency, so I think I just took a bad sample this time (especially given that this was a lower gravity beer).

I've added some photos this time to show how I executed a brew in a bag session in the kitchen of my condo.


This is my brew kettle just after adding my grains to my strike water.  I used the same formula for calculating my strike water as I did with a water cooler mash tun and it worked perfectly.  That is of course with a towel around my kettle for insulation.  

This is a second pot (5 gal.) that I  put my bag of grains into after removing it from the brew kettle for my mash.  I left the bag in here for about ten minutes and stirred up the grains.  I had an over flow last time.  Now I estimate that for a normal gravity beer, I can only have between 2-2.5 gallons in my 5 gallon "dunk sparge" kettle.  


After my "dunk sparge," I removed my grain bag to a large stainless steel mixing bowl where I caught some extra wort dribbling from the grains.  

Given my experience with this second brew in a bag session, I think I will be using this as my primary all-grain brewing method.  Finally, in my last post, I noted that this method produced very cloudy wort. This time, was no different.  I had a lot of break material in the bottom of my kettle after chilling.  But to keep from losing too much wort, I opted to use a hop sack.  I rarely use hop sacks, but I think I will be using them for brew in a bag.  So far, I think this is the best all-grain method I've found for brewing in my small apartment kitchen.  It's also pretty much as fast as knocking out an extract with specialty grains batch.  

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