First off, a little history. I've been brewing extract/steeping grain recipes for about a year and a half and have pretty much wanted to make the move to all-grain from day one. At the advice of a good friend and fellow brewer however, I decided to wait to make the switch and really take some time to understand the process and hone my skills before jumping all the way in. So while brewing extract for the last year or so, I've also been slowly researching and learning as much as I can in preparation to that big move to all grain. So, when recently I discovered BIAB, along with its simplicity and low start up cost, I decided it was finally time to get my feet wet.
Around the same time that I discovered the BIAB method, I also learned that my LHBS was sponsoring an upcoming home brew conference and brewing contest. Even though I only had about 10 weeks to get ready I knew I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to get some valuable feedback from expert judges and to see how my beers stacks up amongst other home brewers. Now, even though I've alway been pretty happy with my beers, after just about every brew session, I can always look back and see something that I missed or that just didn't go quite right. Weather it be forgetting the Irish Moss or boiling over when adding one of the hops additions. It seems like there was always something. I always felt like it could have been just a little bit better. So the pressure was on to make this beer the best beer I have ever made.
I started out by trying to figure out what I wanted to brew. Now, you should know, I've never formulated a recipe before, but I thought, hey, if I was going to do this, why not really do it and enter a beer that I can truly call my own. Around this same time I also happened to try an amazing beer at my local brew pub (Founders Brewing) that was called the foreign spy rye. http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/1199/65932 Seriously, this had to have been one of the best beers I've ever had. To bad they don't have it on tap anymore.
Anyway, they also happen to have another great beer called Red's Rye that I really like so that gave me the idea to try a rye beer. After all, I'd never done a rye beer before and that sounded new and exciting. I started by looking up as many rye beer recipes as I could find on the internet and then researching every ingredient in those beers. It was during this process that I learned that rye was actually a malt that needed to be mashed. I guess that was why I had never brewed one before. I figured it was meant to be. This was going to be the perfect beer for my first mash. So I gathered up all the info from all of the different recipes I researched, and some inside info I had gotten from Founders on the Foreign Spy Rye that I loved and went to work on my recipe.
I have no idea if this will turn out well yet or not, but here is the recipe I came up with.
US 2-Row Malt: 4.00 lb
US Rye Malt: 1.50 lb
German CaraMunich II: 0.75 lb
US Caramel 40L Malt: 0.75 lb
US Carapils Malt: 0.25 lb
US Caramel 120L Malt: 0.25 lb
Belgian Aromatic Malt: 0.25 lb
Light Dry Malt Extract: 2.50 lb
First Wort Hopped
US Centennial 8.5 % 0.25 oz
US Amarillo 5.0 % 0.25 oz
US Simcoe 13.0 % 0.25 oz
15 Min From End
US Centennial 8.5 % 0.25 oz
US Amarillo 5.0 % 0.25 oz
US Simcoe 13.0 % 0.25 oz
Flame Out
US Centennial 8.5 % 0.25 oz
US Amarillo 5.0 % 0.25 oz
US Simcoe 13.0 % 0.25 oz
Dry Hop
US Centennial 8.5 % 0.25 oz
US Amarillo 5.0 % 0.25 oz
US Simcoe 13.0 % 0.25 oz
Expected Pre-Boil Gravity: 1.040 SG
Expected OG: 1.056 SG
Expected FG: 1.014 SG
Apparent Attenuation: 75.0 %
Expected ABV: 5.7 %
Expected ABW: 4.4 %
Expected IBU (using Tinseth): 43.3 IBU
Expected Color (using Morey): 12.8 SRM
BU:GU ratio: 0.77
Mash Efficiency: 85.0 %
Before anyone freaks about about seeing the DME in my recipe, let me explain. This was my first attempt at a mash recipe and I wanted to leave in a little room for error. I figured if I missed my target OG I could easily compensate by adding more or less DME near the end of my boil. Plus, I also wanted to reduce my grain bill a bit. I wasn't really sure if I could fit all my grain and my water in my 30 liter pot. After a lot of searching around and reading on BIABrewer.com, and a lot of help from guys like PistolPatch and Stux, I was able to come up with a plan pretty similar to what is described in the Maxi-BIAB guide
Well, I'm now happy to report that my first BIAB went pretty well. Much better than expected in fact. I discovered that the grain doesn't really take up that much volume in my pot. I had visions of it soaking up and expanding in my pot the way rice or pasta would, but was happy to see it really didn't take up much water at all. After I pulled my grain bag I only had to add about .75 gallons (2.8 liters) of water get up to my full boil volume of 6 gallons (22.7 liters). I also had a much better efficiency than expected. I had planned for about 70% when in reality I was closer to 85%. That meant I only had to add a little over 1 pound of DME instead of the 2.5 pounds I had planned to add. I'm pretty confident that next time I will be able to get away without using any DME and be truly all grain.
The only thing that didn't go quite as planned was I didn't hit my mash temp with the first try. We were brewing outdoors in my garage so the grain was probably pretty cold. I actually lost about 10ºF just by adding the grain. That was a quick fix though and after doing some quick calculations and adding a little bit of boiling water we were back to mashing temp, and once I hit the correct temp, it stayed there for the rest of the mash.
One of the reasons big reason everything else went so well was that I had a very experienced all grain brewer there to help and offer advice. He has hundreds of batches under his belt and was a great resource to have on hand. The other nice thing was he has lots of nice equipment and he brought over a few gadgets to play with. One of which was a wireless digital thermometer. This was awesome and is definitely my next purchase. We were able to stick the probe in the pot, wrap it up and easily monitor the mash temp without disturbing the beer. It had an alarm that could be set to go off should the temp drop too low but that turned out to be unneeded as we didn't even loose one degree over the 60 min mash. I guess the quilted blankets I used to wrap it up worked pretty well.
The other nice piece of equipment that he brought over was a refractometer. It was awesome for taking quick gravity readings during the whole process. One thing that I thought was interesting to note was that for my recipe, which called for a 1.033 pre boil gravity, that we had a SG of 1.028 directly after pulling out the grain bag. That jumped up to 1.044 after a good squeeze.
For those of you who like data, here are some other notes I kept during the brew day.
• Brought about 5.25 gallons of water up to 158º.
• Added 8 lbs of grain. Ambient temp was probably mid to high 30ºs.
• Mash initially went down to 149.5º but then settled at 146º.
• Added 2 quarts of boiling water which raised the temp to 148º.
• Pot was filled to about 1.5 inches from top.
• Settled at 150º after about a half hour.
• Held 150º for another 45 min.
• Total mash time was 1 hour 15 min.
• Mash S.G. was 1.029 before squeezing the bag.
• Mash S.G. went up to 1.044 after squeezing the bag.
• Did not sparge.
• Only needed to add .75 gallons to pot for a total of 6 gallons for the start of boil.
• 60 min boil.
• No boil overs.
• Added 1.25 lb of DME
• O.G. after boil and DME addition was 1.054
• Chilled to about 50ºF then poured everything (turbo and all) into fermenter bucket.
• Shook bucket hard for about 1 min.
• Pitched yeast (Safale 05)
• After 24 hours temp has come up to 64ºF and is just starting to bubble.
• Moved to cool slightly.
• Day 2: (48 hours after pitching) temp is still 62ºF with vigorous airlock activity.
• Day 3: temp is still 62ºF with vigorous airlock activity.
• Day 4: temp is still 62ºF with vigorous airlock activity.
• Day 5: temp is still 62ºF still with strong airlock activity. (Plan to let temp come up to about 65ºF now)
Hope this helps some new brewer in some way.
Thanks Mike.
The judges were great and I thought their feedback was dead on. Most notably, that it was still too young. I could buy that, I had literally bottled the beer only 8 days before the judges tasting. The other comment was that it could use slightly more malt. I attribute that to my slightly low initial mash temp. I'm sure that with what I learned from my first experience, and from the judges comments, that I could brew it even better next time.
