First Timer about to buy equipment - advice needed!

[loffler]

well first off - i would recommend a cool box or bag to mash in instead of the hob or oven so you dont have to constantly watch it.
Use one thats big enough to take the stock pot, so you dont have to mess around transferring all the time, losing heat.
Pre heat the cool box to help maintain temp.

Dont add too may holes in the inner bucket else the water runs out too quick but put enough in that it doesnt get stuck. It took me 2 goes to get it right.
use the batch calculator on here to come up with your volumes for sparging, is pretty accurate.

I put hops in a nylon bag to boil. The reason for this is that there arent really enough hops to make a natural filter. You should really add more hops than when using loose hops as it isnt as efficient but I dont and works well.

instead of cooling in the sink with bottles, invest in or make an Imersion cooler - the difference to the finshed beer is massive. I started cooling in the sink per tut but the resulting beer was so cloudy, it looked horrible! I made a copper cooler and now my beers are crystal clear. The bits for this cost about £15. you dont need a huge IC as only using a small stock pot.

After taking out hops and cooling, I whirlpool the wort to clump all the protein together in the middle of the pot. put lid on and wait 30mins then syphon out into fermentor from side of pot.

I use a whole satchet of dried yeast but you dont really need that much as 11g is for 5G.
i havent had much luck with S04 in terms of carbonation, but think its more to do with my water. Have tried bottled and tap, both come out the same - take ages to cabonate if they do at all. Since moved to nottingham and windsor and had better results. Depends where you live I suppose im in surrey.

Remember if you do want to do a 5G brew, you can do a patial mash with the same equipement as you only mash the speciality grain and boil a concentrate, not the full brew length.
A good book for this is clone brews which gives extract, partial mash and full mash solutions to the same recipe.

Hope that helps a bit

[damo2576]

well first off - i would recommend a cool box or bag to mash in instead of the hob or oven so you dont have to constantly watch it.
Use one thats big enough to take the stock pot, so you dont have to mess around transferring all the time, losing heat.
Pre heat the cool box to help maintain temp.

Thanks - just a standard cool box? Just dump the grains etc in there and leave? I was thinking this since I'm not sure I can control my oven that well....

I did think I read something somewhere else about not disturbing the grains? I guess it cant matter that much if you transfer from stock pot to cool box and to the lauter tun

[loffler]

I put my whole stock pot into the coolbag so I dont have to transfer all the time. You lose a lot of heat transfering all the time - do it as little as possible.
I find a coolbag is better for these small volumes as you can add the pot to it with lid and zip it closed - it moves and stretches a little. Think i got mne from argos.

Heat the water in the stock pot to strike temp, add grain,stir and get to mash temp then put the whole lot into a pre warmed coolbox/bag and close.
Its best to wrap it in a duvet or blanket to reduce heat loss.
When it comes to sparging simply pour the grain into the bucket with holes inside the bucket with the tap making sure the tap is closed!
Then add half sparge water, gently stir, wait 10 ins and slowly drain into now empty stock pot that you mashed in. Add the second half of sparge water, gently stir and wait 10 mins and slowly drain.
If you are doing a 10L brew, I find I need about 13L in the pot to reduce down to 11L which ends up to be 10L in the fermentor