Congratulations on first batch skridgy ,

Great questions too!

I'm not sure where Ralph has gone??? I do remember when he first wrote his guide, it had no numbers in it so I tried to give him a hand to give new brewers like yourself something to follow. It was a busy time then and I'm not sure how successful this was especially given the fact that I have never done a mini-BIAB .

Hopefully some others can help you out better than I can.

Here's a few thoughts...

Firstly, reading what you have written, I think you did a great job. I can't see any mistakes that you personally made. You should be very happy with what you achieved .

Q1.

Depending on your home brew shop, unless you can double-check the weights of grains yourself and understand the recipe, a lot can go wrong. Before your next brew, I'd post up here what you want to achieve and then give the shop your order.

An incorrect grain bill is probably the reason why you failed to reach your target OG howver you should also study this post.

Q2.

I personally think it is a mistake to advise any new brewer to leave a mash alone. Some equipment and environments lead to little loss in temperature during a mash but plenty of them don't. My advice is to regularly agitate the mash and monitor it's temperature until you develop a feel for your equipment. A mini-BIAB has very little 'thermal capacity' so frequent agitation and temperature checking I think is doubly important. Perhaps get rid of the insulation on your next few brews so as you can easily apply heat and agitate.

Q3.

You shouldn't pour 'murk' into your fermenter as a general rule. Garbage in still equals garbage out. That being said, a bit of 'muck' won't do any harm. Some brewers throw in a lot of muck and swear 'no harm' and, on many recipes, I think they are probably right.

Another thing you can do is put all the muck into a jug and let it settle out in the fridge. Once settled, you could ad this to the fermenter but this involves a small amount of risk as your 'jugged' wort has no yeast in it to compete with other bacteria. Sometimes, gaining an extra bit of wort can come at a high price.

....

I honestly think your beer will still be lovely even though the OG looks low. All-grain beers have an inbuilt robustness so you shouldn't be scared at all when a recipe doesn't match your measurement expectations.

Please let us all know how you think it tastes when it's ready.


PP

skridgy wrote:Do I need to make sure that the whole 18.49 litres of water goes in?

Nope. I think the way you did it is just fine. You'll want the most water that you can fit in your kettle, but don't stress if you can't fit it all, it can always be added later. For my process, I target a pre-boil volume that will barely fit in my kettle without boil overs. This means that I can't fit all the water in the mash. I'll take a gravity reading and top up with the appropriate amount of water to hit my desired pre-boil gravity. I never worry about volumes, only the gravity, which I think makes the most sense for brewing smaller batches.

skridgy wrote:Should we have started with a higher temperature? Is this much temperature loss normal or did we get our insulation wrong?

This sounds pretty normal for mini-BIAB. Like PP said, you have less thermal mass and everything will lose heat faster. Your goal should be to start at the correct mash temperature, then try your best to stay close to that temp. If you have any way to heat your insulation, you'll see a slight improvement. I do this by wrapping the kettle with the insulation while bringing the water to strike temperature, be careful not to light it on fire

skridgy wrote:So, it's probably splitting hairs to ask this, but my question is: should we have poured some more of the murk into the fermenter?

I think this is a personal preference. If you don't think that the trub affects the flavor, then pour the whole thing in there. If you don't like all of that in your beer, then leave it out.

[MOD NOTE - 7th January, 2013: It looks like PP thought he was replying to this thread when he wrote the below. The right answer to this question depends on many variables. The BIABacus makes this easy. See this post to get started or feel free to ask questions here.]

Hi there jarvo and welcome to the forum. Sorry you haven't got a faster answer here yet to your question. Maxi-BIAB is a pretty tricky area though.

For example, the maxi-BIAB example given in this thread is very extreme. You really don't want to be filling kettles to the brim when mashing and boiling. It is very laborious and messy. So, treat this thread more as an extreme brewing thread.

It's very important to understand the limitations of maxi-BIAB. Have a read of this post and also the summary at the end of this post. These will help you to keep things sensible and I think might provide a better answer to your question.

The BIABacus also automatically estimates volumes and many other things for you and will let you know if your brewing plan starts to get extreme. It's the only software that does this so allow some time to learn it and ask questions before you do your first brew.

,
PP