All Grain Brewings

Today Dan and I started our first all grain batch of beer. Well, technically it's not a beer, we decided to make a saison based gruit. A gruit is a medieval version of ale that uses a blend of spices or plants instead of hops.

In order to make our beer, we had to make ourselves a mash tun. To do this, we got a 10 gallon rubbermade cooler, and replaced the spigot with a stainless steel braid hose attached to a ball valve. What this does is allow the liquid through the hose without letting the grain through.

The next step for us was

heating the strike water. We used beersmith to

determine what temperature water we would need at the specif

ic quantity we wanted for our grains. For this recipe we had 12 pounds of grain, and ended up mashing a bit thin with 5 gallons

of water at 149 degrees. After stirring in the grains, we put on the lid and let it sit for about an hour.

Once the time was up, we started recirculating the wort until it started running clear(ish). Once this was completed, we just had to drain the wort into the pot. We ended up with about 2.5 gallons from the initial 5 gallons we put in. In order to make our full volume for the boil, we batch sparged with an additional 3.5 gallons for a total of 6 gallons in the pot.

The initial bittering addition was a half an ounce of wormwood. This was

the only thing in the beer for our hour long boil, and then we followed up with a mixture of sweet gale, chamomile, rose hips, elderflower, and wormwood. It should be interesting to see how this ends up, since not only is this our first all grain beer, it's also our first attempt at doing anything without hops. All in all things went fairly well though.

The one issue we found after cooling was that we really had no way of telling how much wort we actually collected (we suspect we got more than 6 gallons to start), and how much we had in the pot when we were finished. These are going to be important figures that we'll need to determine at some point so we can hit our target gravities without problems. As it was, we ended up 12 points under our target gravity with an expectation of 75% efficiency. However, since we ended up with about half a gallon more than we expected, it looks like we got close to the right efficiency, at 70%, we just didn't boil off as much as we expected. Once we figure out a way of determining how much wort we collect and how much we end up with, we can more accurately estimate the amount of boil off we have in a normal batch. It should be good.

- Adam