This was my first all grain kit, purchased from Midwest Supplies. For ease of entry into all grain I decided to use the Brew In A Bag method. Since I decided to brew at more or less the last minute, I purchased a pair of 5 gal, nylon paint strainer bags and used those as my BIAB bags. They worked well, but it was a bit unwieldy wrangling 2 bags full of soaked grain out of my brew pot. I may try a larget bag next time, but have a feeling I may not be using the BIAB method for long, instead opting to make a mash tun.
Brewday actually went pretty smoothly. I used 3 gal of strike water at approximately 165 and surprisingly it gave me almost exactly 152 once everything was all mixed up in the brew pot. The brew pot did not hold temp very well, as I expected, but fortunately I had the foresight to immediately get a pot of water on the burner so that I could warm the mash as needed. I was able to keep it within a couple of degrees of the target mash temp the entire time and ended up using approximately 5 gallons of water total by the end of the mash.
One failing was that I did not tie off the tops of the bags, so I did get a small amount of grain spilled into the wort, but I was able to scoop it out with a small strainer as it was coming to the boil, along with some of the hot break.
The boil went well, but I think I had more evaporation than I expected, at the -15 min hop addition I checked my level and found I was about 1/2 gallon down, so I added some more water and kicked the burner into high gear to get it back to a boil quickly. This extended my overall boil time by about 5(ish) minutes.
This was my first time using a yeast smack pack. Followed the instructions on the back of the pack, and it had a good 5 hours to get going in the pack before I pitched. I spent a lot of time feeling the bag to ensure that I got the inner pack broken and shook it a ton to make sure it was mixed, but after nearly 5 hours there was was there ZERO additional bulging of the pack. The outside of the pouch got thoroughly sanitized prior to pitching so I'm not worried about contamination. Yeast was pitched at approximately 6pm yesterday (2013/01/13) but and as of 11am today (2013/01/14) there is absolutely zero fermentation activity. None. Concerning?
Hardware mod/improvement:
I took my Dremel with a cutting wheel to the lid of my brew pot and cut a notch for the chiller. It worked great and the hop bag did a nice job of filling the spaces in the notch, making for a pretty snug fit.
Also, I rigged a female hose fitting to a piece of hose for my chiller so that I could use hose water to chill. Did not want to purchase 2 bags of ice. I'm torn whether I want to keep using that method or go back to the 'recirculating chiller water through a cooler full of ice. Torn because I like using less water (ice) but don't like the additional cost of said ice and I'm too forgetful to make up a bunch of ice ahead of time.
