All Grain Brew

After 5 or so years of making beer kits up I decided to look around at more complex brewing techniques. The step up from Kit Brewing is Extract Brewing. Which essentially allows you to take malt extract and boil it with hops to make your own beer. The next step is all-grain brewing, which means you start with malted grains, steep them and then add and boil your hops. So your beer is fresher, and more personalised. Now, all Grain brewing can be complicated and use a lot of equipment that wouldn't fit in my house. It was then I discovered the world of Brew In A Bag. This technique was invented by the Australians, and it allows for the brewing of beer in a single vessel.
So, I only really needed two additional things to my usual brewing equipment: A big stock pot and a large bag.

 
The stock pot I found on eBay for £20. For the bag I took a shortcut and bought a sheet of Voile (£4) which I cut into a circle, no sewing, no seams to rip.

Brew in a bag is a surprisingly simple, but long process. First thing to do is add water to the stock pot an bring it up to temperature, in this case around 70C. It's a 19 liter pot, but I also want to add grains and also leave room for the water to boil, so I used 15 liters. I did an experiment the night before the brew and my hob took approximately 2 and a half hours to get to this temperature. So on brew day I cheated and used the kettle to speed the process up. Shortly before 70c was reached I put the Voile in the pot and tied it in place.

Really, I was aiming to step at around 67C, the reason I aimed for a temp of 70C was to allow the water to cool when the grains went in. I wanted to do a really simple brew using one type of grain and one hop, known as a SMaSH recipe (Single Malt and Single Hop). For this I was using Maris Otter grains, in they went.

Once they were in the whole thing has to be left to steep for between 60 to 90 mins, this allows the sugars from the grain to dissolve into the water. I left them for 60 mins, wrapped in a towel to help keep the temperature up. I was concerned about losing too much heat, but I only lost 2C in the end.

Once the steeping had finished (technically called Mashing) it's time to bring the whole lot up to boil. This took about 30mins on my hob. Once the wort was boiling I added the hops. I was using Fuggles as it's a hop I'm familiar with and I wanted to see what it tasted like in a SMaSH. 28g went in to boil for 60 mins.

This amount of hops should bring some bittering to the very sweet wort. With 15 mins of the boil left I added another 15g of hops for flavoring.
Once the boil was done I needed to cool the wort as quickly as possible. To achieve this I put it in our sink with cold water and ice.

The ice melted really fast and the water soon heated up. I discovered I could run the cold tap and the sink overflow at the back would take care of any excess, so I left the tap running for about 30 mins. I then needed to transfer the wort into a fermenter. I placed a colander with a sieve in it into the top of the fermenter and used a jug to transfer about half of the wort. After that I was able to lift the pot and pour the rest in. From 15l of water to start with I ended with 10.5l in the fermenter, not too bad. After that it was a simple case of sprinkling on the yeast and putting the fermenter in the beer cupboard for a couple of weeks. We'll have to wait and see how it turns out...