Diving into All Grain Brewing

In my first post, "starting to brew at home", I talked about what my next potential equipment and strategies would be.  Suffice it to say, I did not follow the "plan", but instead dived into trying out all grain brewing.  As I did a my research on the web from google to youtube and the various home brew sites, I started to get an idea of the all grain process and what I would need to get into it.


I felt that the best and easiest way was to go for a gravity setup with batch sparging.  With this in mind, I set off to price out the equipment I would need - basically a mash tun and an HLT (Hot Liquor Tank).  For an HLT/MT setup I found several options - one using brew pot so you can do direct heat or using a cooler method and then heating the water from my brew pot and it's burner.  Obviously the cooler method would keep costs down as I wouldn't need to get another burner or brew pot, which is more expensive, so I opted for that.  With the cooler option I had a choice of rectangular or circular coolers, I preferred the look and potential even heat possibilities of the circular cooler - even though they costs more.  With my data in hand it was time to begin the search...

I found that for a 5 gallon setup (i.e. 5 gallon HLT and 5 gallon MT) that the price ranged anywhere from $130 to $250.  Then I ran across videos and tutorials on how to make your own MT, so I decide to do that and cut the cost.  I went down to Lowes with my part list in hand and for ~$65 was able to buy and build a 5 gallon MT.  Given I was aiming for batch sparging I didn't think I would need an HLT as I could just dump the sparge water from the pot directly to the MT when it hit temp.

Now that I had my equipment it was time to find the first recipe I would brew....  As I started looking around at the various recipes I noticed that many of the ones I liked required, for a 5 gallon batch, 4.5 gallons of water for the mash with ~12lbs of grain.  While this is doable with a 5 gallon MT, I thought it would really be pushing the limit, so I set off to Home Depot to get a 10 gallon cooler for my MT, since I was there, I just bought all new parts for the valve and bulkheads figuring I could keep my 5gallon as an HLT since it requires less liquid and could then have the potential of doing fly sparging in the future.

With my updated equipment in hand, I continued my search for a recipe and settled on a 2.5 gallon batch of a Fat Tire clone.  Why 2.5 gallon, when I spent all the time setting up for 5 gallon batches - simple; I figured if I screw it up it won't hurt/cost me as much to toss it out.  Off to the store to buy the grains, where the guy found it funny that I would be doing all grain brewing before I ever started kegging or replaced my bucket fermentor with a glass carboy.   I believe his comments were - "I find it amazing and awesome that you are doing all grain brewing before getting a carboy and are still bottling as it's backward from what most people do."  What can I say, as a home brewer, we all go about things in our own ways and at our own time.

Wrapping up - I completed the brew of the Fat Tire clone at 2.5 gallons and it's currently in the fermentor.  I found All Grain brewing to be just as a fun as extract with only a little bit of time added; ~1.5 hours to do the MT/HLT steps...  I'll update once I've sampled it.

Resources

Building a mash tun

video: http://mainlinebrewers.com/projects/

Parts list: http://mainlinebrewers.com/projects/mlt/

Building a weldless bulkhead

http://www.antiochsudsuckers.com/tom/DIYweldlessfittings.htm

http://www.hausofhomebrew.com/homebrew-brewpot-spigot.html

Fat Liar (Fat tire clone)

http://www.tastybrew.com/newrcp/detail/686