Well we all look at that Holy Grail of brewing knowledge with trepidation.  You know; All Grain batches.  Well I am here to tell you that this is not as hard as it sounds.

I had the desire to step up and try my hand at all-grain, if for no other reason than it costs less to make a batch of beer!  Also, the control offered and the ability to make a lighter colored beer held my fancy.  I already had a converted keg with a spigot and decided that I should tap the resources available to me.  I sent an e-mail out to all the club members and asked if anyone was willing to give a poor extract brewer a had.  Of course, I got a good response and finally hooked up with Mike Marshburn.  He said he was going out of town and wasn't planning to brew until September.

I borrowed his 10 Gallon Gott mash tun, Valley Mill, and 8 gallon pot. He was also kind enough to provide half a cooler full of 2 Row malt that he would not be able to use.  Toting this home my mind began to work in overtime as I contemplated how I would pull off this feat with only one burner to use (Mike offered his but I thought I could pull it off with just mine).

When I got home I decided that the best way to do this was to elevate my burner so that I could use my keg as the hot liquor tank and set the Gott on a stand that would allow me to drain the wort into the 8 gallon pot. This proved to be the trick and when Sunday came around, Kurt Haywood came over and we proceeded to muddle our way through the process.  I had decided to do a 5 gallon batch of my brown ale as the first attempt. When I first started brewing, the brewer at Wine and Cake told me to start out with a Brown because you could mess up on almost everything and it would still come out all right.  He was right so I figured that the first all grain should be a brown also.

We heated the water up to 167 degrees and drained 3 gallons into the mash tun.  With me stirring like a madman and Kurt dumping the grains in we actually hit 152 degrees on the dot. Here is the point where we found that grain brewing was a little boring!  After about 20 minutes we noticed that the temperature had dropped to 149 degrees and we debated what to do about it.  Stirring seemed to be the prudent choice so we opened the tun up and stirred the mash around for a couple minutes.  The temp popped right back to 152 degrees and we both breathed a sigh of relief.

At the 1 hour point I decided I should have borrowed the iodine and tested for starch conversion.  We decided to be on the safe side and let the mash go for another thirty minutes.  Mike told me that he batch sparged, but since I had the tun sitting next to the hot liquor tank and I had been a little bored and made a makeshift sparge arm out of a copper pipe cap, I would try the drain and sparge at the same time routine.  We started the sparge and I re-circulated about 1 gallon of wort until it appeared to be clear.  I then started the run off into the 8 gallon pot resting on the floor.  The sparge went a little fast and was over in about 25 minutes.  We set the burner and the keg back on the ground and transferred the wort from the 8 gallon pot and started the boil. Everyone told me that a 90 minute boil was what I should do, so that is what we did.  The boil was uneventful and identical to an extract batch. We finished the boil and transferred the wort into my 6.5 gallon carboy and pitched the yeast.

We started this all grain odyssey at 10am and finished the cleanup at 4pm.  All in all it did not take much longer than an extract batch with steeping time for the grains.  I missed my target gravity by a few points due to an incorrect efficiency percentage.  I figured 80% and actually got around 70%.  Not bad for the first try.

Stay tuned for the next batch using a keg with a false bottom as the mash tun.
 

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