I was going to brew my first all grain today but instead I was delayed and detoured at every turn. People in the morning, discovering my RO water source is really just the local tap water (TDS meter). So I had to make 2 trips for water. The mash tun inaugural debut was a bad one, it kept leaking. I had to go to home depot and get O-rings after readjusting a couple times. And then I had to play with different configurations of orings and washers to get it to work. 4 leak tests and readjustings later and I get to mash in. It's now 12:30 AM. I've been tryign to brew for about 12 hours. I just said screw it and threw the first runnings back into the mash tun cooler with the sparge water. I'll deal with it tomorrow. I heated it up, the first runnings before adding it back and mashed out. Everything is pasteurized, so I feel fine about contamination. For now I'm calling it quits, but I'll be back tomorrow. Here's to a better brew day.
Sorry to hear you had some snags. Sanitized is good so that you get to a mash out temp. This halts conversion--slows conversion for an overnight mash. The boil will take care of any sanitation you need later today. Hang with it. It'll be tasty.
Sorry you ran into trouble - I can sympathize with your frustration. Are you just adding salts or are you planning to monitor your pH throughout the mash? Also, what is the grain bill? Just looking for areas where you can simplify your first AG batch. It's pretty straightforward, but I found that there were many factors I'd not considered or planned for when brewing my first few batches. Hope the next attempt is less frustrating. Cheers and keep us posted!
Whoever is selling tapwater as RO water is possibly... defrauding people. I would get to the bottom of that. (It's possible it's unintentional, maybe the membrane has failed without the vendor realizing it.) I don't fully understand the status of your runnings and your sparge water at this point, but it sounds as though you should be able to do your boil today, and from here on out it should be the same as extract brewing. So hopefully you'll have a better time today than you did yesterday.
Sounds like typical a typical set of setbacks when modifying one's process. Stick with it and soon enough you'll be back to boring brew days. A good thing to do with a major upgrade is to do a dry run with just water. Cheers!
I poured everything back in the cooler and let it sit overnight. And half the day to be honest. It's boiling right now on my balcony. I'm looking forward to boring brew days. And moving to a house, with a garage! Being an apartment dweller / homebrewer is a challenge.
I just got a proper sized ratchet to remove and re-attached my keg posts on my corny kegs. Before that, I would use a terrible wrench to loosen and tighten them. It was awful. It took forever and I was never sure if I had tightened them back on securely. I still laugh when using the ratchet now. It takes just a few seconds to remove/re-attach. Point being, it's satisfying to overcome these obstacles and look back on them thinking, "Dam, so glad I don't do it that way anymore." It's annoying but definitely part of the fun. Good luck and enjoy the improvements/fixes. Better days ahead for sure! (You actually reminded me that my mash tun cooler developed a bit of a leak during my last brew day. Need to look into that.)
