AllgrainJock

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Hi All

Im new to all grain brewing, have done a bit of 5 Gallon Extract in the past but far prefer the new found Challenge of recreating some lovely craft beers. I live in A tower block flat in Scotland, anybody aware oh these will also be aware there is nae space for much, also the electric hob cooker cant handle a pot much bigger than 10 litre and I cant afford to run a 3 KW kettle for an hour, hence my choice for 1 Gallon (4.5 litre in my case) all grain batches.

I Recently made 2 batches using all grain kits bought from my local brew store, both seemed to run smoothly, one was a Red Ale the other a Wheat beer, a big problem I notice I will be facing with my set up is Very large quantities of Sediment and ultimately loss of finish product.

I had used quite a fine cheese cloth bag for my grains although it obviously did not prevent the smaller practicals. My plans for my next batches are purchasing a finer mash bag, then after the mash, poring the wort into a second sanitised container through a muslin square, also poring the sparge water through the bag of grain which will also run through the muslin square. I will then return the wart to its Boil, when this is complete and I have cooled the wort I was then planning on lining a funnel with a fine coffee filter paper where I'll then poor my wort through this into the demi john before aerating and pitching yeast.

I am aware this is unlikely to prevent all sediment but should help a bit, my BIGGER question and worry is if any the pulp I am filtering has any significant contribution to yeast health or flavour, in other words, Am I at risk of creating a poorer environment for the yeast, or indeed the finished flavour and product by removing most of the fine particles at this stage or are all the vital sugars/flavours/nutrients already dissolved in the wort and safe from being filtering out ??

Any info would Be much apreciated
cheers
 
As long as you’re not getting tannin flavors, you’ll be okay. A lot of the fines that pass through will coagulate in the boil or drop out during the fermentation.
 
A proper grain bag will eliminate all but the finest particles from your wort, and any sediment (trub in brewers lingo) from the boil kettle that goes into your fermentor will not do your yeast any harm. I dump the entire contents of my kettle into my carboy and I have never noticed any off flavours or yeast health issues from the added material in the carboy. I aim to bottle 18 litres from each batch of beer, so I plan my recipes to give me 20 litres into the fermentor so I can leave behind the 2 litres or so that are mixed with the trub, this leaves me with nice clear beer in my bottling bucket.
 
When I went all grain I started with 4.5 litre batches. I used the largest hop bag at the homebrew store for the grains and at the end I just dumped everything from the kettle into the fermenter. The losses at that scale can be frustrating, but you get to brew far more often and hone your skills.

There's opinions and evidence on both sides of your question. Some degree of sediment helps a healthy fermentation and some of the sediment may be better left in the kettle. At your scale I wouldn't filter too much, but without buying specific filtering equipment doubt you could get to the point it hurts the fermentation.

If you're doing something pretty hoppy you can aim for a 5 or so litre batch in the kettle and just transfer the clearer top 4.5 litres to the fermenter.
 
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I always say let it sort itself out in the fermentor then rack the beer of the top of that. As Mark hinted at getting too complicated post boil trying to filter through strainers or bags pre-fermentation can have more negative effects through possible contamination risks.
I use Swiss Voile material for my brew bags but I'm sure your local brew store will have just what you need if you've not got it already.
Enjoy the hobby.
 
Thanks for the replies folks, put my mind at ease a bit, I am deffo going to purchase the better grain bag, was put off as the smallest was 5 gallon which I assumed would be to big, I will also scale my recipe's to 5 litre leaving a bit extra , after a bit reading I have also been made aware, wheat beers can leave more sediment, and this is what I have initially been judging this on..
 
A paint strainer bag from your local hardware store works fine! Size it to fit your pot and be sure to clip the edges so it doesn't fall into the pot.
 
Just regarding your volumes, a word to the wise. If you are accustomed to litres, stick to litres. If you are doing anything on this site in gallons, just remember that the US gallon is 3.79 litres, where the UK gallon is 4.55 litres. I am in Canada, before we switched to litres decades ago we used the UK gallon here too.
 
Just regarding your volumes, a word to the wise. If you are accustomed to litres, stick to litres. If you are doing anything on this site in gallons, just remember that the US gallon is 3.79 litres, where the UK gallon is 4.55 litres. I am in Canada, before we switched to litres decades ago we used the UK gallon here too.

Hi Mate
yeah.. I am well aware of that now and its annoying when the majority oh Recipes i am attempting to scale are five gallon... I have basically been converting the us gallon to litres, dividing it by 5 then multiplying it by 1.32 which gets me to around the 5 litre mark same with the dry ingredients and hops converting to kg/gram
 
The US gallon system works for me, I'm in the fluid power business, and we measure everything in US gallons. When I first started brewing I tried to embrace litres in brewing, but I just couldn't get my brain to figure it out, too old I guess...
 
The US gallon system works for me, I'm in the fluid power business, and we measure everything in US gallons. When I first started brewing I tried to embrace litres in brewing, but I just couldn't get my brain to figure it out, too old I guess...
With me its just greed mate, fact I'm only doin 4.5-5 litre batches, would grudge the extra space left in the DemiJohn if I done 3.7... thats an extra bottles worth :)
 
Stick with metric. It makes most things so much easier.
 
Looking at the way your talking about your scaling have you tried the scaling tool in the recipe builder? When I'm stealing US recipes I set it to evil units, enter all the values. Turn it into metric and then use the tools menu and the scale option to set it down the batch size I want. Much simpler and then it's just rounding off some values so people at the homebrew store don't hate me.
 
Looking at the way your talking about your scaling have you tried the scaling tool in the recipe builder? When I'm stealing US recipes I set it to evil units, enter all the values. Turn it into metric and then use the tools menu and the scale option to set it down the batch size I want. Much simpler and then it's just rounding off some values so people at the homebrew store don't hate me.

Yes mate I have gave the calculator a bash, still getting used of the site, all these calculators brilliant, make the game so much faster ;-)
 

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