For my second AG, I wanted to do a small brew length of 6 liters. But my mash tun cooler is a little big for such a small amount.
I came across this method : http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/forum/ ... php?t=4650 which looked interesting, so I though I would give it a go.
The idea is to use a voil/cheese cloth bag to hold all your grain and mash right in your boiler. This saves you having to have a mash tun & HLT.
Once mashed you need to bring the whole lot up to mash out temp, then hand the bag over your kettle to drain, then business as usual.
The method worked well, and made the day a whole bunch shorter, most of that saving coming from clean up time. I definately will use this method again for my shorter brews. The efficiency was a touch under 65%, but that was about where I was with my efficiency using my normal mash tun, so no biggy.
The recipe for the brew:
brew length 6 liters
Pale Malt 720 grams 46.9%
Flaked Wheat 615 grams 42.4%
Crystal Malt 31 grams 2.1%
Oat Flakes 100 grams 6.9%
orange peel 14 grams 0.9%
Coriander seed 7 grams 0.5%
Chamomile 4 grams 0.3%
Black pepper 1 grams
east kent golding 60 mins 11 grams 100%
The Grains:
Tried to crack the wheat proved to be almost impossible, so I ended up wetting it a bit then leaving for a few minutes and blitzing in the food processor. Not the best crush, but better than trying to pound it with the pestle and mortar.
Here they are all in the bag :
Strike temps are a little wired to handle, you only need to go about 2c above your required mash temp as you are mashing with all your water, the grains don't affect the temps much at all. I ended up doing a 75 min mash.
After the mash and bringing it all up to mash out, time to hand the bag for draining. Drained and squeezed took a total of 15 mins.
I twisted the bag up a bit to squeeze some more wort out of it, and then poured about a liter of water over it from my kitchen kettle. That gave me 10 liters of wort which should be bang on for my boiler. from here on in, it is just like a normal brew.
On to the boil:
It was great having everything already heating up as the hot break happened just after I had taken the bag off the hanger.
After cooling using ice water and a pump, collecting into FV
Trub :
Into my Fermentation Chamber :
All done.
Enjoy it,
Travis
