All grain brewing commandments || Online all grain homebrewing course
Channel: Team Homebrew
Date: 2017-01-09

Download the free companion ebook Raw Beer: Getting Into All Grain Brewing. http://teamhomebrew.com/get-free-stuff/all-grain-brewing-beginners-ebook/

Before we begin, let’s have a look at the all grain homebrewing guidelines. Following are 10 areas you need to consider for successful all grain homebrewing.

Master these and your life will be much easier.

1. Pay attention. It’s hot and sticky

You are handling large volumes of boiling liquid. Pots are hot, the grain bag is hot. Burns and scalds are a real possibility.

Wear gloves and covered shoes.

Also wort is really sticky. Unless you watch your pot carefully, it can quickly boil over and create a mess.

2. Clean and sanitize

As with all homebrewing, this is a must. With all grain homebrewing, you will also have invested extra hours of your time and energy.

It would be a shame to see it wasted with an infection. Clean completely.

3. Mash in completely

When mixing the grain and hot water, make sure you break up any dry balls that form.

The malt ‘porridge’ (AKA mash) should be completely wet. Otherwise your beer will end up starchy and unstable.

4. Mash at 153 F (67 C) for 60 minutes

Enzymes in the grain will transform starch into sweet fermentable sugar at this temperature and time.

You can go down to 147°F (64°C) for a drier, more fermentable beer.

If you mash higher (up to 156°F/ 69°C), you will get a sweeter, full bodied beer.

A fall of a few degrees over the hour will not have much impact.

5. Don’t aerate your mash or hot wort

Oxygen is a bad thing in the mashing, boiling and cooling stages.

Through complex chemical processes, oxygen in hot wort will cause your beer to stale more quickly.

mash out all grain brewing6. Don’t heat your grain too much
If your wet grain gets over 170°F (77°C), you will extract tannins and other compounds which aren’t great.

Monitor mash temperature carefully. You also need to minimize any grains and flour that get into the boiling pot for this reason.

7. Get a good rolling boil

You need to vigorously boil the sugary malt solution to:
- develop flavors
- destroy microbes from the grain
- extract bitterness from hops
- drop out proteins.
The stronger the boil, the better these processes are.

8. Cool quickly
There are processes happening in hot wort. The longer they continue, the more likely your beer will taste a little odd.

Also cooling rapidly caused proteins (cold break) to drop out more quickly and minimizes the chance of infection.

9. Aerate your cool wort
Now oxygen is good. Confused yet?

Yeast needs oxygen to reproduce and ferment your beer. One your wort is cooled, you won’t get the staling issues from oxidization we mentioned above.

This is less of a problem if you are using fresh dried yeast. It comes ready-packed with resources to reproduce.

10. Minimal sludge in the fermenter

Once cooled, there will be a layer of hop debris and proteins on the bottom of your pot.

As much as practical, avoid getting this in the fermenter.

Now you are familiar with these principles, let’s recap the homebrewing fundamentals that can make or break your all grain adventures.