So here’s my current setup.
It can handle all grain brews maxing out at ~11-12 lbs of grain, which is fine for me. If I want to brew anything higher, I’ll just add a little bit of DME. I can handle just about anything under 1.070. The cooler didn’t have a spigot in it so I just drilled a 1/2″ hole near the bottom and made one myself. It’s the standard 3/8″ ball valve on one side and stainless hose braid on the inside. People complain that the stainless hose can float up into the mash and flop around, so they’ll turn to some other method. Well they don’t know much about fluid dynamics. The only crucial part of the straining mechanism is the part over the outlet. It doesn’t matter if the thing is flopping all over the place, as long as it strains near the outlet it’s perfectly fine. And mine does. It drips once every 10 seconds or so, which over an hour builds up to about a 10 ml. or so of wort. The insulation in this thing is incredibly stable, I’m amazed. It doesn’t drop more than 1/2 degree over an hour.
It can handle all grain brews maxing out at ~11-12 lbs of grain, which is fine for me. If I want to brew anything higher, I’ll just add a little bit of DME. I can handle just about anything under 1.070. The cooler didn’t have a spigot in it so I just drilled a 1/2″ hole near the bottom and made one myself. It’s the standard 3/8″ ball valve on one side and stainless hose braid on the inside. People complain that the stainless hose can float up into the mash and flop around, so they’ll turn to some other method. Well they don’t know much about fluid dynamics. The only crucial part of the straining mechanism is the part over the outlet. It doesn’t matter if the thing is flopping all over the place, as long as it strains near the outlet it’s perfectly fine. And mine does. It drips once every 10 seconds or so, which over an hour builds up to about a 10 ml. or so of wort. The insulation in this thing is incredibly stable, I’m amazed. It doesn’t drop more than 1/2 degree over an hour.
The boiling kettle is 30 qts. and was a christmas gift from my brother over at Pinelands Brewing Company that got me started. As you can see there was a bit of a boilover. It’s just that there was still a lot of sugar still being sparged and I wanted to get it all.
Here’s the mash tun with the spent grain.
Don’t let anyone tell you that you need a 10 gallon cooler to do all grain. This thing is 6 gallons and just brewed a high gravity Belgian just fine. When the wort was in the cooler the liquid level came up to just below the big line.
I brewed the Zeta after work on friday. Everything went well for the most part. My roommate and I just built a covered deck out back so now I can brew in the rain, which is a big plus here in Oregon. We have plenty of chairs and even a bar on it, so keeping everything compartmentalised is really easy. This was my first all grain batch, and I was a little nervous my mash tun wouldn’t fit all the grain as it’s only a 22L cooler. Well it was just about perfect for 11 lbs. I could probably fit another 1 or 2 lbs. in there. Awesome. If I want to do anything bigger than, say, 1.065 or so, I’ll just add some DME to the boil.
The fruity, slightly citrusy nose from the dry hopping really hits you hard after pouring this. The color is, well you can see for yourself to the left. This is my second attempt at this IPA, with a few small changes. I traded up more of the extract for grain, altered the hop schedule a bit by adding some late addition palisades, and used a different yeast. I have to say the first attempt may have been more balanced. I had been having trouble with low attenuation and a lot of residual sugars, so this time I mashed at 63C and put a space heater a few feet from the fermenter to keep the proper temp (never controlled this before). I also pitched a packet of Safale US05 instead of a Wyeast slap pack of Rogue’s Pacman like the first attempt, though word on the street is that Pacman is just a US05 mutant. Let’s just say that did the trick.
