This is addictive. I cooked up a partial grain Nut Brown Ale tonight.

2 lb Maris Otter
.75 lb (12 oz) Caramel/Crystal 60L
.5 lb (8 oz) victory malt
.25 lb (4 oz) chocolate malt
1 lb flaked oats
6.2 lbs light LME

1.00 oz Fuggles [4.50%] (60 min) Hops 14.7 IBU
1.00 oz Goldings, East Kent [5.00%] (15 min) Hops 8.1 IBU
1 Pkgs Nottingham (Danstar #-) Yeast-Ale

There was s period of time where I had twenty, or forty gallons of different brews in various stages of completion in my house..lauter tuns in closets lol

Some beers benefit from sitting in a cask and just settling..provided you have a good airlock, mild temps, and keep it in the dark..

I made five gallons of a Lambic which I aged for a over a year...

When I was serious about brewing, I made beer every saturday morning. Time between things on the days batch was used to move beer from primary to secondary to keg. I kept beer in secondary/settling for 2 weeks, and then kegged. So there was always about 20 gallons laying around the house.

The beer production will slow when SWMBO decides she can't stand the smell/sight of more beer

SWMBO

:D I had to look it up :D

She's been a good sport so far, but the pantry smells like a brewery and I'm looking for a spot to store another 5 gallon carboy.

When things settle down a bit, I might reactivate this hobby. If I do, I will buy a beer frig for the kegs and get a freezer with a high temp regulator for fermenting.

I still have a lot of my equiment, but I will need a new propane burner, tubing, probably replace my square cooler with a Gott/Igloo, do a general upgrade to facilities. Brewing, etc will be in the garage, so I'd need to setup things to be a bit cleaner.

^This is a decent recipe. I did another hoppier batch of this last Saturday. I boiled over in my kitchen, tho. SWMBO was not amused, so I'm really looking to take the operation outdoors and move to an all grain setup.

Has anyone used a 15 gallon keg with a false bottom for a combination mash tun/brewpot? Do you recommend a setup like this for all grain? What other hardware will I need besides the mash tun/boil pot and a wort chiller? Is it worth it to start growing my own yeast instead of buying it at this point?

You really need to have a separate mush tun and boiler. Most of the "keg" setups I've seen used multiple kegs with each having a separate function, and permanent tubing in between.

Okay, thanks. Any opinions on how to set up a multi-tiered system?

I'm looking at a 3 tiered system on ebay right now with a hot liquor tank in the first position, the mash tun in the middle, and the boil pot in the last and lowest spot in the chain. They are staggered in height so they gravity feed into each other without a pump. From what I'm seeing and reading it looks like I mash in the middle tier and then open a valve and gravity feed the wort into the boil pot. Then open the valve between the hot liquor tank and mash tun and sparge the grains into the boil pot. Is this how it works?

here's the setup I'm looking at: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300328670200

Do the igloos work okay for this? I've had a lot of issues trying regulate temperature on the kitchen stove doing partial grain batches. Will an igloo mash tun like this hold the temp for an hour? How long do they last before you need to replace them?

Those Igloo coolers work well for mashing grains.. hold the temp well, easy to clean, etc. You can do the whole brew using gravity to move the liquid around, and they are easy to clean.

I made a whole RIMS system using beer kegs which I cut up, welded fittings and valves on etc.. The Igloo cooler is much easier to to store clean etc..

Before you spend big bucks I suggest you try an all grain batch or 2 with simple methods.

Buy a 6-7 gallon pot for boiling the wort

Get a picnic cooler for the mashtun/lauter tun. You can build a latering system with drilled pvc piping. I use a Jack Smidling (is he still around?) EasyMasher, which is a sealed SS screen and a brass tap.

Found a picture, and they haven't improved the picture since I bought mine 12 years ago!

http://schmidling.com/em.gif

I replaced the outlet of the cooler with the Easymasher.

For sparging, I used a large water pot of water, and I made sure I slowly poured the water in, and had it hit a spoon so it wouldn't create channels/stir stuff up. The grain husks themselves are the filter, not the lautering system.

You crush the grain (have the home brew shop do this for you! They usually will.) Put it in the mash tun. If you do a single step infusion, you pour in a water. There are equations to calculate the infusions. I have an excel spreadsheet for infusion mashing, if I can find it!

Once you have let the conversion take place, you add boiling water to stop the conversion (raise the temp from mid 150's to around 170-175).

Then you basically, you open the tap, and it will start out cloudy, and you recirculate this back into the cooler until it goes clear. Then you add the sparge water on top of the grain and drain until you the specific gravity drops low enough that you're getting mostly water. (Hint here, if you acidify the sparge water, it will prevent pickup of tannins, even if you go pretty low in specific gravity).

Take your 6 gallons (you'll be boiling it down!) and start the boil. You need to boil it for 60-90 minutes. The rest of the process is the same as what you are used to. It will help if you have a wort chiller, so that the wort is cooled to 70F as quickly as possible.

Back into the mash tun until it clears at the spigot?

Thanks for the heads-up on the Easy Masher. I'll look for one of those. The local homebrew guy is asking $300 for a 15 gallon keg based setup with a false bottom & all of the fittings/tubing. It's a fair price, and he had sold me on transferring to my current thinwall SS pots and using the modified keg to steep, sparge, and then boil in, but I really like this multi tier system with the igloos. It will take up more real estate, but it's affordable, and it seems like it will make for a smoother process. It's all about process :)

Yep. It is actually pretty darn simple.

Trying to find my old brewing spredsheets is not so easy. I think I'm going to have to setup an old SCSI drive to find my spreadsheets.

bump....

I moved on to AG a few months ago and am getting ready to upgrade even further to a full blown quasi-automated RIMS system. Fun stuff.

I have a yeast starter going right now for a Belgian wit that I will brew tomorrow night.

Recipe is as follows:


Grain/Extract/Sugar
----------------------------------------------------
5.50 lbs. Weyerman Bohemian Pilsner
5.50 lbs. Muntons Wheat
8oz Flaked Oats
8oz Torrified Wheat


Hops
-------------------------------------------------
1 oz. Hersbrucker pellet hops 60 minutes
1 oz. Saaz 15 minutes


Extras
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Oz Corriander Seed - crushed Spice 5 Min.(boil)
1 Oz Sweet Orange Peel Spice 5 Min.(boil)

Yeast
-----
Safbrew WB-06 starter

you may want to add some sugar to that recipe. just saying.

Belgian candi sugar? Or, more grain? It was an alleged Hoegaarden clone when it started, but the local homebrew shop guy had almost nothing that I needed from the original recipe.

Also, do I need rice hulls? I can't imagine my mashtun getting stuck, but almost every wheat recipe I see calls for the rice hulls.

"Belgian candi sugar" is possibly the biggest rip-off at the brew supply, bar none. belgian candy sugar is (hold on to your hats!) sucrose (!). even worse is "dark" belgian candy sugar (yep, its sucrose with some dye added to it).

just put about a pound of table sugar in that recipe and you are off to the races!!!!

rice hulls are for adding bulk to the lauter. they help, but you are probably ok. just sparge slowly.

Thanks, nynor!

I'm getting ready to add a Hot Liquor tank and a separate boil kettle to my current mash tun. Any suggestions for how to construct the system? Gravity fed 3-tier? Or, do I weld up an angle iron frame and use 3 vessels and a food grade SS pump on a single tier? Any experience with a BrewMagic keggle system? I'm taking a hard look at the brewmagic.

http://www.brew-magic.com/sitebuilde...30-528x400.jpg

I used 1/4 cup of Turbinado in my starter, but I forgot to throw the table sugar in the boil.

I ended up using ~1lb of rice hulls in my mash and was still completely stuck when I opened the valve on my mashtun to sparge. This is the first time I've ever brewed a wheat beer. I blew the valve out with an air compressor and didn't have any more issues.

The wort was A LOT darker than a Hoegaarden, but the orange and coriander were definitely present when it went into the fermenter last night. It may not be a perfect Hoegaarden clone, but the blowoff tube attached to my fermenter is really blowing bubbles right now so I guess it will make some beer :D

Is it okay to leave something like this in the primary bucket for 3 weeks? All of my carboys are full and it's supposed to be a cloudy beer, so I figured I would not bother racking it.

And, any thoughts on the following for my next batch, an alleged Chimay Red clone?


10lb Maris Otter
4 oz. Aromatic malt
8 oz. Caramunich malt
1 oz. Chocolale malt
1.5 lb. Belgian clear candi sugar
1.5 oz. Tettnanger @ 4% AA (bittering)
.25 oz. Styrian Goldings (aroma)
.25 oz. German Hallertau Hernsbrucker (aroma)


Mash grains for 90 min. @ 150 deg.
add bittering hops and candi sugar, boil for 90 min,
aroma hops last 15 min.,
Wyeast 1214 or WLP500

yeah, you can leave it like that for about three weeks. when it is fully done fermenting, say 10 days, i'd put it somewhere cool for the duration. the risk isn't really cloudiness, it's that the yeast will begin to autolyze.