All-Grain for Beginners - What NOT to Do

Since I began brewing three years ago, I've mainly brewed with an extract base and steeped specialty grains for colour, flavour, and complexity. Only once have I ventured as far as partial mash (extract base + a small infusion mash), when I made an oatmeal stout and read that the oats needed to be converted before they could be used. But truly advanced brewing means dumping the extract and going all-grain - making your own wort by mashing your malt at specific temperatures to allow the enzymes therein to convert starches into tasty sugars that the yeast can munch on. This requires some specialized equipment, and living in tiny apartments without much space for hobby stuff has always meant that I couldn't take that leap.

But while I'm a patient man, I can't wait forever. So on Monday, without any of the proper equipment and only a copy of John Palmer's How to Brew to guide me, I improvised a mash tun and filtering system and embarked on my first all-grain brew. 

The beer is coming out nicely. But the process was.... a mess. Here's how not to do it.

The Recipe

It's springtime, but it already feels like summer. So I opted for a summery beer. Based on the fact that I already had some Saaz hops and a bit of toasted wheat flakes lying around, I put together a recipe for a Belgian Witbier, a refreshing unfiltered style with a 50/50 base of wheat and barley malt spiced with coriander and orange peel. 

Grain bill:

4.5 Lbs Pilsner malt

4.5 Lbs flaked wheat

Hops and spices:

0.5 oz Saaz hops (8.1% AA) @ 60 mins

0.75 oz Coriander seed, cracked @ 5 mins

0.75 oz Bitter orange peel @ 5 mins

Yeast:

Wyeast 3944 (Belgian Witbier)

IBUs: 16

Expected OG: 1.049

Expected FG: 1.012

Expected ABV: 4.8%

This recipe is done strictly to style, according to the BJCP style guidelines. Ingredients came from Dan's Homebrewing Supplies, the best homebrew shop I've been to yet. If you're not in Vancouver, I recommed Beergrains.com - though they no longer have free shipping, they're still the best deal, and they ship all over Canada.

Equipment

What You Need

For the most basic of all-grain homebrewing setups, you'll need something like the following.

Mash tun 

There are two recommended mash tun options for the home brewer, each with their advantages and disadvantages.

Cooler: A converted insulated cooler is an inexpensive and reliable method. The insulated walls keep your mash consistently at the right temperature, so you just need to do a bit of math to determine the temperature and volume of water to add to get to your next rest. (Rests explained later on.)

Stainless Steel: More expensive, but much sexier-looking. This one typically uses direct heat (either with a heating coil, or on the stovetop). Less math is involved, as you won't necessarily be adding hot water to it - instead you adjust the heat and bring your mash up to the next temperature step. The downside: You must be very vigilant about temperature. It's easy to get too hot, which is much worse than too cold, because overheating will destroy the enzymes that you are relying on to convert your starchy mash into sweet wort.

There are cheaper DIY options as well. Just get something that can keep the grain away from your finished wort.

Filtration

Your mash tun should absolutely be fitted with a false bottom - a stainless steel mesh or other holey filter that sits above the bottom of your vessel, which traps the grain. Below the false bottom is a nozzle, through which you drain the sweet wort. This means you don't end up with grain husks in your brewpot (which could extract unpleasant-tasting tannins), and it allows you to lauter and sparge after mashing. 

The grain bed sits on the false bottom, and hot water is sent through the bed, out the nozzle, and into the brew pot, extracting precious sugars along the way. This helps with your efficiency and lets you get more out of less grain.

What I Had

Mash Tun

My apartment doesn't have much storage space for a 10-gallon bright yellow cooler, which, left out in the open, would be kind of an eyesore. (Well, I'd be proud of it, but I'm not the only one who lives here...) 

So, improvisation. Nine pounds of grain requires a lot of water (about 1.25 quarts per pound, plus more for lautering). I happen to have an old 10-gallon aluminum pot that came out of the Zeller's closing sale. Aluminum is definitely not good for heat retention - the pot's only benefit is its size. But I hoped that the mass of grain would help keep things fairly consistent.

Nine pounds of grain next to the giant pot.
On the left: coriander, hops, and one of many more pots.

Filtration

This was the toughest part, and I didn't give it much thought until I needed it. Somehow I got it into my head that I could pour off the wort into other pots by filtering through grain bags. That was a really stupid idea, which resulted in a sticky floor and sticky pants. I ended up using a plastic colander, which presented its own challenges, particularly since my mash tun was doubling as my brew kettle (due to its being large enough to handle a full-batch boil without topping up). 

Again... lots of spills. This batch will end up much smaller than the target 19 L.

The Process

Step Infusion Mash

The purpose of mashing is to bring your water and grist to specific temperature points, at which different enzymes can act on the grains to effect different results. There are a number of temperature stages at which different enzymes activate, and brewers will use some and ignore others depending on their recipe and their preferences. The most important step is saccharification, where starch is converted into sugar, but there are other useful ones along the way. Here's the schedule I followed:

• Beta-glucanase rest: Held at around 100° F for 30 minutes. This is a gum breaking rest for unmalted adjuncts. Because my grist is 50% unmalted wheat, it's an important step toward making it accessible to the yeast.


• Protease and peptidase rest: Held at 125°F for 30 minutes. The range here is pretty forgiving; I chose 125 because it allows for a few degrees above and below. Protease makes proteins soluble and helps with head retention. Peptidase takes those soluble proteins and turns them into free amino nitrogen (FAN), an important nutrient that helps yeast build cell walls and reproduce.


• Beta-amylase and Alpha-amylase rest: Held (and slowly increasing) between 140°F and 154°F for 75 minutes. This is the sacchirification rest, where these two enzymes take all the starch bits that the earlier enzymes had broken down and turn them into maltose and other sugars. It's the trickiest one, because alpha-amylase works at higher temperatures, but beta-amylase works on the chains that alpha-amylase produces. For an infusion mash, this means holding at temperatures that aren't really ideal for either enzyme, because if you go too high neither one will work.

Enzymatic activity went on throughout the progression up these steps, but these were the key ones for me.

Mashing

I started out with grain in the pot. I heated up 11.25 quarts of water (1.25 qt per lb grain) to get things started, and poured it in.

Grist in the pot

Heating up

 Next the gum-breaking rest. At this point the mash has turned into a milky soup of proteins and starch.

Not too appetizing.

Then the protease/peptidase rest. Once the proteins have gone into solution, the mash has turned clear again and looks a lot prettier.

Proteins have gone into solution and are turning
into FAN.

Finally, the saccharification. This was tough. I had to crank up the heat and stir like hell to make sure it was evenly distributed. There were a few panic moments when the thermometer suddenly registered way above target temperature, but stirring soon brought it back down. This was a tense stage, but I knew it had worked when a taste test revealed that the starchy mess had turned into a very sweet and tasty wort.

Looks cloudy. Did I do it right?

Mashing Out

Ugh. This was a bad scene. Don't try this at home... Get yourself some decent equipment first.

Once I had a pot full of wort and grain, I had a problem. How to separate the grain from the wort?

You can't start a boil with a pot full of grain. At boiling temperatures, bitter tannins and other unpleasant compounds are extracted from grain husks. But lacking a proper mash tun with false bottom and spigot presented a quandry.

My first thought was to set a grain bag over a pot and use that as a filter. I struggled to secure the bag around the mouth of a rather big pot, and only managed to get it halfway on. Then I lifted the 10-gallon mash pot and tried to steady it for a smooth stream through the grain bag. That... didn't work. Grain pretty quickly spilled into the second pot. Lots of sweet wort was retained in the leftover grain. My pants, floor, and stove were soaked. Time for a new tactic. I pulled out the colander.

Not pictured: sticky mess.

I was brewing alone, and only had two hands and a wide pot. So I attempted to balance the sieve over the pot and pour the mash through.

Almost immediately the sieve fell into the pot and splashed wort everywhere. Then I grew a brain. Ladled all the grain I could into my multiplying set of pots, sent the wort back into the main one, then got myself a spare pair of hands for the colander.

Works surprisingly well.

The floating colander proved a pretty good way to sparge. I couldn't fit all the grains in it at once, of course, so it had to be emptied and re-filled, but at least I was getting the sugars out and keeping (most of) the grains out of the wort. (I used another tool to screen out as much grain as I could before boiling.)

Pre-boil wort. Don't know if the haziness is OK or not...

The Boil

I can't say much about this step, as I was absent for most of it. I didn't realize the mashing would take as long as it did, and then because I was cooking a huge volume of water in a huge pot on a crappy old electric stove, it took over two hours just to get the liquid to boiling point. I had to get to Hapkido class before that happened, so I left it in Darrell's hands. 

It went OK - she reported a boilover after the hop addition (watch out for those), but nothing major because the pot was so big. The bigger problem: she couldn't lift the giant pot into an ice bath when it was done, so there was no cold break. (Rapid cooling causes more proteins to precipitate out, making for a clearer beer. Witbiers are hazy anyway, so hopefully it's OK.) 

Fermentation

The lack of a cold break may go toward explaining why the wort was so cloudy when I finally got home and put it into the fermentor. I don't have a picture of it, but for the first few days it looked like pea soup. I worried that something may have gone wrong. 

But after a week of fermentation and a whole lot of flocculation (yeast precipitating out with all the other crap in there), it now looks like a beer!

Fermentation not yet complete.
Still some settling to do.

So despite a lot of setbacks, it looks to be a successful first all-grain brew. Due to my dimwitted approach to its production, I've decided to call it either "Half-Wit", "Dim-Wit", or "Nit-Wit". It smells good - bready aroma with orange and coriander as expected - and looks more like a witbier every day. Hopefully it'll taste good too. I'll let y'all know in a few weeks when it's time to taste it.

Conclusions

If you're a newbie and want to try all-grain brewing for the first time, here are a few suggestions to take home:

• Get the right equipment. It doesn't have to be a converted cooler or a fancy stainless steel tun. It could be as simple as two nested plastic buckets with holes drilled through the bottom of one and a spigot installed in the other. (This is what I'll probably be doing for my next home brew.) 
• Avoid old-fashioned electric stoves. These things suck. Especially for boiling large volumes of liquid. It's really hard to keep the temperature under control, because the heating element doesn't change temperature instantaneously. If you've got access to a gas burner, use it. Otherwise, I'd really recommend a portable induction cooktop. (This has been on my shopping list for a while now.) Just make sure you have the right kind of pot. 
• Read the all-grain section of How to Brew before you start. You'll want to have a full understanding of the whole process ahead of time, and you'll definitely want to plan your rest temperatures.
• Get a copy of your municipal water report. (For example, see Vancouver's and Toronto's.) You want to know about the salts and minerals in your city water. If it's too chlorinated or too alkaline, it's bad news. Similarly, you may have too much or too little of a particular mineral. There are certain salts that contribute to yeast vitality and to the flavour of your beer, and others that cause problems. This doesn't matter so much in extract brewing, as all the necessary minerals were present when the extract was made, but when making your own wort it can be critical.
• Brew with a more experienced partner the first time round. I'll be doing that soon with my upcoming Northern English Brown Ale, but I was impatient and wanted to get started immediately. If you don't have a more experienced friend, make friends with a good brewing book.