With a whole bunch more brew space, and over five years of solo brewing under my belt(!), I’ve been rapidly diversifying from the tried-and-true partial volume, extract with steeping grains, brews. The quality (in my humble opinion) on many of these beers has been pretty good (the Rainy Day IPA, Vanilla Voay Porter, and Fake Tire Amber Ale being particularly successful), but I do feel like I’ve gotten the handle of many aspects of extract brewing. I’m looking for a bit of a challenge and to expand my brewing skill set. The first step was full-volume boils, and the logical next step was to try all-grain. But, I had been a little intimidated by the complexity of the all-grain setups I had seen. Three-part towers, hoses everywhere, sparge arms, and the like seemed like a lot of equipment investment just to try a new technique. But then I learned about batch-sparging. Basically, all I would need was a converted cooler. Done and done!
- 7.5 lbs pale malt (2 row)
- 0.5 lbs. Victory malt
- 0.5 lbs. Munich malt
- 0.5 lbs. 40° crystal malt
- 0.5 lbs. 20° crystal malt
- 0.5 lbs. Cara-Pils malt
- 0.25 lbs. chocolate malt
- 1 oz. Cascade whole hops (60 minute boil)
- 1 oz. Cascade whole hops (5 minute boil)
- 1 tsp. Irish moss
- 1 pkg. Safale American ale yeast US-05
- Mash in ~13 qts. of water at 165° with malt for 1 hour. This resulted in a temperature of 154 degrees within 5 minutes, but it ended up at 145° by the end of the hour.
- Decanted liquid, added 1 gallon of water, brought temperature up to 146°.
- Decanted liquid, added 3 gallons water, brought temperature to 148°.
- Decanted liquid, which had a specific gravity of 1.034 at 60 degrees. The volume in the kettle was around 5 gallons.
- Heated to boil, added first addition of Cascade hops, boiled for 45 minutes, added Irish moss, boiled for another 10 minutes, added second addition of Cascade hops.
- After the 60 minute boil, I turned off the flame and chilled the wort to around 70 degrees.
- I transferred the wort to the fermenter, and pitched the yeast (which had been rehydrated in 1 cup of water). The wort fermented at ~68°.
- The starting gravity was 1.045 at 60°, with a starting volume of 4 gallons.