First BIAB attempt

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Nice post novaris .

And, welcome to the forum .

Your question contains all the info needed to get a good answer but it will take a bit of time to write the answer. I'll have time to take a crack at it tomorrow.

Some other guys might even tackle the problem before me?

Between now and then, let us know the diameter of your kettle as from this we can take a guess at what your evaporation rate will be. (If you do know your evaporation rate, then just let us know what it is in litres per hour.)

As to your BeerSmith question, unfortunately I, nor anyone else will be able to provide a quick answer there as it can be quite tricky. BIABrewer has a guide here. If you read through it, you'll be able to sort through some of the tricks.

Hopefully we'll get the rest of your question sorted tomorrow.


PP

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No probs novaris and thanks for the PM too (Will get to that tomorrow).

Okay, here we go ...

Mash Time

90 minutes is a safe mash time. Gravity does increase between 60 and 90 minutes so your efficiency will also improve slightly. 90 minutes for a boil is also safe and I've used a 90 minute boil below.

The Recipe

For your recipe, I've mainly used the new calculator that will be going up on the site soon. The report side of it is not ready yet so I'm just going to copy and paste the results here.

Volumes

The below assumes that you will hold back 10 litres from the mash. Of that 10 litres, use 7 litres to dunk-sparge and then add the remaining 3 litres when you can, during the boil.

Total Water Needed (TWN): 29.61 Litres
TWN-M (at mash temperature): 30.20 Litres
Mash Volume: 23.19 Litres
Volume into Kettle (VIK): 24.90 Litres
Evaporation: 6.18 Litres
End of Boil Volume (EOBV): 21.84 Litres
EOBV-Ambient (EOBV-A): 21.00 Litres
Kettle Trub and Chiller Loss: 3.00 Litres
Volume into Fermentor (VIF): 18.00 Litres
Ferment Trub / Packaging Loss: 1.00 Litres
Volume into Packaging (VIP): 17.00 Litres

The Grain Bill

The new calculator is estimating your efficiency into the kettle to be 80.3%. Your gravity into the kettle should be around 1.044 and your original gravity at 1.050. Here's the bill...

2124 grams Golden Promise
950 grams Pilsner
419 grams Brown Malt
337 grams Flaked Barley
214 grams Chocolate Malt
214 grams Roasted Barley

The Hop Bill

22.0 grams Target (11.0%) at 60 minutes
6.7 grams Fuggles (4.5%) at 15 mins.

Sorry I can't give you the file as yet but hopefully the above is enough to get you by. Let me know if I've forgotten anything or if anything doesn't make sense.


PP

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Thanks PistolPatch that is all clear to me I should be good to go.

Aces high wrote:Did you design the recipe? Thats a fairly extensive grain bill for a first brew and you'll be struggling to work out where one flavor finishes and the next one starts. If something is overpowering or badly balanced you gonna have a hard time working out where the problem lies.

Thanks for the tip on maxi-biab I will have a look at it. The recipe is a popular one from the aussiehomebrewer website apparently it works really well so we will see /

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Excellent. Your Volume into Kettle is pretty high for your 27 L kettle but you can always just add a bit of what you sparge later in the boil.

Aces mentioned Maxi-BIAB but he would have missed the bit that I totally buried in my last post about holding back 10 litres. Any time you hold back water from the mash you are doing a 'Maxi-BIAB' of some sort though more thought needs to be put into the terminology as there are four ways you can increase your 'batch size' when you have a small kettle and only one of these requires a second vessel.

You'll need a second vessel of some sort to sparge those 7 litres. A food-grade 20 litre plastic bucket will do you fine. (Mind you, you'll also need to heat that 7 litres on your stovetop to about 78C before you sparge so you are now really a three vessel brewer with two heat sources )


PP

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Yes I might have to adjust the boil down slightly we will see. I will be doing a batch on my 3V system at the same time so the HLT from that can easily supply the boil additions.

I am still trying to decide if I will chill the BIAB wort or go no chill. Depends a bit on the way the day goes. I chose the stout partly because it has no late addition hops, my reading indicates no-chill has some problems with flavor/aroma hops but I will worry about that in future brews

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BobBrews wrote: But problems? I think there is a lot of information on this site that can show that no chill is not a problem.

When I said problem I really meant for me i.e. I don't have my head around it fully yet.
I have been doing a bit of reading here and found it very enlightening, the whole no-chill thing seems interesting and people seem to be doing it successfully, both here and on other sites I have looked at. What interests me is why or how it works? What are it limitations?

When you look at the reasons to rapid chill:

How to brew - John Palmer wrote:At the end of the boil, it is important to cool the wort quickly. While it is still hot, (above 140°F) bacteria and wild yeasts are inhibited. But it is very susceptible to oxidation damage as it cools. There are also the previously mentioned sulfur compounds that evolve from the wort while it is hot. If the wort is cooled slowly, dimethyl sulfide will continue to be produced in the wort without being boiled off; causing off-flavors in the finished beer. The objective is to rapidly cool the wort to below 80°F before oxidation or contamination can occur.

Rapid cooling also forms the Cold Break. This is composed of another group of proteins that need to be thermally shocked into precipitating out of the wort. Slow cooling will not affect them. Cold break, or rather the lack of it, is the cause of Chill Haze. When a beer is chilled for drinking, these proteins partially precipitate forming a haze. As the beer warms up, the proteins re-dissolve. Only by rapid chilling from near-boiling to room temperature will the Cold Break proteins permanently precipitate and not cause Chill Haze. Chill haze is usually regarded as a cosmetic problem. You cannot taste it. However, chill haze indicates that there is an appreciable level of cold-break-type protein in the beer, which has been linked to long-term stability problems. Hazy beer tends to become stale sooner than non-hazy beer. The following are a few preferred methods for cooling the wort.

and from

beersmith - DMS article wrote:Heating the SMM present in pale malt will always produce some DMS. During the mashing process (and even the boil), some SMM is broken down into both DMS and a variant of DMS called Dimethyl Sulfoxide (DMSO) which is basically DMS with an oxygen atom attached. So after the mashing process we have wort that contains both DMS and DMSO (as well as some residual SMM).

It seems the key reasons for rapid chilling are:
infection control, dimethyl sulfides / dimethyl sulfoxides, oxidation and cold break proteins and stability.

As I presently understand it no-chill deals with infection control, long boil prior to no-chill deals with DMS, hot wort will contain little oxygen and the small headroom in no-chill deals with the oxidation issue.

That leaves us with DMSO and cold break proteins. Both of which I have no real certainty about. While I dont know the chemistry I suspect DMSO is not a problem as oxygen exposure is limited and restricts DMSO production.
But is the cold break still a problem?

After reading Argons - Late Hopping And No Chilling Guide from AussieHomeBrewer's it would not surprise me that the flavour and aroma hopping issues he described, is the result of the extended heat period knocking out the flavour and aroma compounds in the wort.

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BobBrews wrote:Well known beer experts have accumulated a lot of knowledge in years of researching "Old" books and papers. Books written years ago where based on myth and conjecture. They became truth with time. We now have more time to think and are questioning our cherished "truths"!

Great point BB I guess this is true in many areas.
Anyway I did the first BIAB brew on Sat, and dont you just love the way that things can go wrong
I was probably a little ambitious as I decided to brew NS Summer ale in my old 3v setup and the 3 Shade stout in the new bag setup.

Well my first problem was I wanted to run 2 boilers one for BIAB and the other my HLT. Of course that proved to be too much drain for the circuit breaker, not to worry there was another circuit in the garage for the garage door (as it happens we never got an electric door) so I decided to use that. So I setup the boilers and wandered off, half hour later I come back and the BIAB boiler is getting nice and warm but the HLT is stone cold!

After 15 minutes stuffing around I realized that the idiot that wired the garage had hooked the door circuit to the light switch -- no lights no door

Well after turning the lights on I finally started to get heat into the HLT and in a bit I had both setups at strike temp. So I started adding the summer ale to the mash tun, that was when I noticed the next strange thing, I kept forming dough balls, this has never happened to me before but not too worry. Once that was on I put the stout into the boiler to mash. Checked my temps and all was good so off I go for a while.

An hour later I come back and get ready to mash out on the summer ale, for some reason I decided to do a temp check and to my horror it was down to 58c not my original 64c (I still have not figured out how it fell so much.) Anyway I did a starch check and it was fully converted so I went ahead and added the mashout/sparge water.

I then went and checked the stout and again checked the temp this time the shock was in reverse 72c not 67c it turns out I had not dropped the boiler thermostat low enough and some time after I left the element came on again and started heating the mash (it seems my boiler has a huge hysteresis). Once again I checked for starch and it was clear so I started lifting the temp to 76c for mashout.

Meanwhile I went back to drain the summer ale and finish the sparge, of course it had to happen, the dough balls turned into a stuck sparge. I had read about them but never had one before. After an hour of stuffing around I finally had to take the grain bag used for the stout and dump the summer ale into the bag to drain it.

Thankfully the rest of the process, boil, chill etc all went smoothly and in the end I finished with a rich dark stout and beautiful golden coloured summer ale in the fermenters.

Three Shade Stout target was 18L of OG 1.05 and I got 19.65L OG 1.053
Nelson Sauvin Summer ale target 20L OG 1.046 and I got 20L OG 1.05
So now we wait and see if they taste as good as they look

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