Mini Brew In A Bag

I was lucky enough to win a bag of grain at the recent homebrew conference, and it wasn't a small bag - just over 25kg, direct from West Yorkshire

Normally I brew partial-mash beers, using dried malt extract to boost the strength of my beers so that I can produce 23+ litres of a reasonably (or even unreasonably) strong brew. But with so much grain to hand I had no excuse to not brew 'all grain', ie with all of the sugars coming from the grain itself.

The first issue was 'cracking' the grain - in other words taking the barley seeds and cracking them open by using my Corona hand mill . These are the seeds before they were milled

and after 20 minutes or so of surprisingly easy grinding here's what's known as the 'grain-bill' - 2.75kg of cracked barley along with 1/2kg of munich malt and 1/4kg of cara-pils, 

I was limited by the size of my brew pot, a mere 19l which meant that I could only produce a half-batch of around 12 litres, but it gave me the chance to experiment without endangering huge quantities of grain or water. I was trying a style called 'Brew In A Bag', a relatively equipment-free way of brewing which coincidentally was developed in Australia in response to water shortages.

Once the grain was prepared I brought around 12l of water up to around 76 degrees C, lined the pot with a brew bag and tipped in the grain. 

After a decent stir I had a nice malty broth at around 65 degrees

I left it for an hour or so at a constant temperature to let the enzymes in the malt break down the sugars - I used an old sleeping bag to help insulate the pot and lost around 3 degrees over that hour. This is traditionally the time where you 'relax and have a homebrew' but in my case I needed to have a late lunch and get a new gas bottle - preparation is everything.

After the mash I drained the bag - it's good to see my old climbing gear still has a purpose 

and whilst it dripped I kneaded the bag to help pull out those lovely sugars. Silicon gloves helped kept my hands from being burnt 

and also helped with my Dr Zoidberg impression - *whooop whoop whoop whoop*

Next came the controversial step - the 'sparge'. This is simply using additional water to help suck out more sugars from the grain, but it seems to be the basis of a lot of disagreement on the homebrew forums. I kept it simple and tried using 5l of room temperature water in an Esky. I dropped the bag in and give it a decent knead, then hoisted it from the skyhook again and let it drain.

For homebrew nerds, I ended up with around 10litres of 1.058 gravity wort and the sparge gave 5 litres of 1.028 gravity wort. Mixed together they gave around 15l of 1.047 gravity wort, which needed to be bought to the boil.

The used grains ended up in the compost bin

And the wort was put on the gas burner. Next time I'd use warmer sparge water and I'd kick off the boil of the original wort whilst I'm sparging, which would probably save me around half an hour.  

By this time a storm had rolled in and my burner had no windshield, so I couldn't just add hops at the appropriate times. I needed to stay outside and keep an eye on the pot for the full hour long boil. Me, an under-cover hammock, a cold beer, a spattering of rain, a hot fire and rolling steam - it was very meditative

but sadly all things come to an end and after an hour it was time to cool the pot in a water bath 

My fermenter is still full of cider so I needed to make do with what I had to hand, but the 11 or so litres of 1.062 brew that I produced fitted nicely into a handy water container

Our little family of fermentation is doing well

and the new brew seemed to be flourishing - this is a day and a half later at an ambient temperature of around 16 C!

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2BIaaSGMZ8

 

I should end up with around 10 litres of almost 7% IPA - or I can dilute it a little once the initial fermentation dies down and get around 14 litres of a 6%ish brew. You the readers are also generally my beer tasting circle, so which would you prefer? Let me know what you think, and in a week or so I will follow up on the most popular suggestion...