After being stumped and stopped at every turn yesterday, I had a great thought while out buying water for brewing last night. I picked up a bag to do brew-in-a-bag. Brew in a bag is a pretty neat thing that the Aussie home brewing community came up with as a super cheap way to do all grain brewing. For 5 bucks you can buy a bag big enough to line your boil kettle. Then you just mash your grain in place and lift out the bag and squeeze out any remaining water/wort from the grains.
At 10AM I put the bag inside my kettle and started up the flame. At 10:57 I started the mash. I mashed at 155F for 60 minutes. I had a moment of clarity and wrapped the kettle with the electric blanket, so I only had to reheat it once at 45 minutes in, and I probably could have skipped that.
While I was setting up the mash, I heated up the honey for my second batch of mead. While I was heating up the mash to mash out temp, I racked my first batch of mead over to secondary and put 4 gallons of water and 4 quarts of honey on top of the leftover yeast. Hopefully this will be a nice low cost, low maintenance method for making a second batch. My gravity on this batch is pretty low, 1.070, so will be adding fruit to this at some point to help boost it up.
At 1:04 the boil started rolling and I added an ounce of UK Golding hops and an ounce of heather tips. I didn't have much of a problem with boil overs thanks to a little bit of breeze. AT 15 minutes left I added irish moss and the immersion chiller to sanitize it. At less than 5 minutes I added the remaining ounce of heather tips. It all went along pretty well. After flame out I started the water running through the chiller. It only took 20 minutes to cool from boiling to 65F.
One thing I seriously underestimated was how much the heather would reconstitute in the boil. The bottom 2-3 inches of the kettle was all hop debris, heather tips and trub. It took forever to run the wort into my carboy because both the spigot on my kettle and my siphon kept getting clogged. In the end I came in 9 points short of what I was shooting for at 1.041. This should still net around a 5% ABV beer.
Three things jump out as lessons learned. Use a hop bag with heather tips, they are like little wort sponges; Crush grains finely for BIAB, it should really help with efficiency; Do not attempt to make a mead in the middle of brewing a beer.
I started at heating strike water at 10AM and I was done with cleanup by 3:15. That makes a 6 hour brew day, which is about normal for me. I did basically 2 brews in that time however. I like the brew in a bag method, but I still want to try a parti-gyle in my 10 gallon mash tun cooler.
Pics:
The bag with the grain inside a basket hanging over the kettle.
Me squeezing the grains
Mixing the mead
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