Wed Feb 06, 2008 9:42 am
You are most welcome Brian.
Glad you managed to finally get a brew together after all the waiting around for gear and ingredients to get to you. With all that patience, you will make a fine brewer.
68°C is 154°f which is Jamil's magic mash temp... You hit your strike temp and it was a good one; no ones laughing. Did your pot lose much temperature during the mash time?
Murkiness - As Spills said above, yep, BIAB brews are always a bit murky in the kettle. This freaks out people who have a thing about clear wort, but actually makes basically no difference to the final quality of your beer. You might also have simply been a bit unused to the amount of stuff that comes out in the boil, just because you are brewing All Grain now... a LOT more stuff comes out of solution in the boil with an AG beer than an extract beer. And the hops murk things up nicely if you are using pellets.
That said, give it a nice whirlpool, let it settle for 20minutes (or however long it takes to chill if you are using an immersion chiller) and you should be able to rack nice clear wort into your fermentor. If you need to add top up water to your kettle, do that before you whirlpool.
If you got too much murk into the fermentor... indeed it will settle out. You could ignore it for this brew and it will probably be just fine, but if its freaking you out, just rack to a secondary once the krausen falls back into the ber a bit. Leave any yuck behind.
The boil off ..... well, thats a personal relationship between you, your kettle and your burner. You will have to brew a few batches till you work out how much yo boil off in an hour. Remember, if you are makng a small batch (you said your first one was 10L yes??) in a big pot, your boil off will be really high in % per hour terms, and it will be hard to get down very much. Once you start to brew bigger batches, the amount you boil off will stay roughly the same in Litres/hour, but there will be more liquid to start with so you will lose a smaller percentage. Aim for between 10 and 15% per hour when you are brewing full sized... but unless you use a smaller pot, you will struggle to get that in a 10L batch
Refractometer - measures dissolved solids. Any gunk floating around will have minimal effect on your brix reading. BUT it will have an effect on your ability to accurately read your refractometer. The suspendid solids will mke the line fuzzy and hard to read. Stick a tissue or a piece of toilet paper into a small funnel to use as filter paper and filter 20ml or so through that, it will remove the vast bulk of any solds and give you a few nice clear drops for your refractometer. The solids don't effect a hydrometer at all.
Suggestions ..... relax, dont worry, have a homebrew. Then brew again. Its your first AG, its supposed to freak you out a little bit. But the beer will be good and hopefully you had fun.
Look forward to hearing abot your next batch.
Cheers Mate
Thirsty
