Hi- I'm a beginner home brewer and I'm brewing Papazian's "Holiday Cheer" spiced Ale recipe tonight. The only thing I'm not sure about: how much water should I steep the grains in? It's a 5 Gallon batch, should I steep in all 5 gallons, or less? There is about 3/4 lb. of specialty grains in the recipe. Any advice or help is much appreciated. Thanks!
The water to grain ratio is not especially important for a specialty grain steep. I'd say use at least enough water to completely cover your grains and allow the grain bag to move freely around in the pot.
Al Korzonas (Homebrewing Vol. 1) recommends that you steep grain in no more than 1 gallon of water per pound. Below is from pg. 91 of the book. “When moving up to full-boil batches, the natural thing to do is to bring 5.5 to 6 gallons of water to 170° F and steep the crystal and dark malts in the entire volume. I made this mistake and brewed quite a few astringent beers until I figured out what I was doing wrong. When you soak a pound of crystal malt in 1 ½ gallons of reasonably low-carbonate water, the pH stabilizes at around 5.2 to 5.5 (after subtracting 0.35 to compensate for the temperature if you measure at room temperature). I you put that same pound of crystal malt into 6 gallons of water, the pH can be well above 7 and this is too high for steeping grains. This high a pH will extract lots of polyphenols (a.k.a. tannins) from the grain and result in an astringent beer. The solution is to steep the grain in no more than 1 gallon of water per pound.” Cheers!
I have never had any tannin issues when using the full volume to steep grains, but based of of the previous post, it is possible that the water i use is acidic enough to not extract them. Something else to consider is that if you want to end up with 5 gallons of wort, you will need to use more than 5 gallons of water. There is not one set amount to use, because how much water will boil off is affected by how much heat your set up has, as well as liquid malt extracts (and even dry one) contribute volume, and even some water will get soaked up by your grain. If I am doing a batch with two quarts of LME and only a few pounds of DME, I start with 26 quarts (6.5 gallons) of water for 60 minute boils.
Thank you guys very much for the feedback, this is very helpful. I think I'll go with less water (1 to 1.5 gallons) to steep the grains to play it safe, and I'll make sure to have a little more than 5 gallons total for my boil. Thanks again.
Good point but with only .75 lbs of steeping grain I wouldn't worry about it soaking up water. OP: I have always just steeped in full wort volume. While the others are technically correct I have never personally had any problems from the way I do it.
When I did extract, I'd never steep in more than 3 gallons, and this was for some grain bills close to 2 lbs in some cases. Enough to cover the grains in the bag was plenty.
I heat 1 gallon of water to 150-160 and then turn off the stove and let my steeping grains sit for 20-30 minutes. Then I bring 5 gallons of water to a boil on my burner outside. By the time I'm done steeping the main pot is boilng nicely. If your doing a full boil this seems to work well and saves some time.
Welcome to the addiction. Just a heads up since this is your first brew and you are doing it in the evening, unless you have a wort chiller or a lot of ice water you may be up fairly late tonight waiting for it to cool off before transferring to the bucket/carboy and adding your yeast. Also, ignore all the cool to 80*F crap, cool to low 60s for an ale, or to low 40s for lager.
Or you could chill it as far as you want tonight, put it in an ice bath in a bucket, and pitch in the morning when the temps have dropped.
You guys are great, I really appreciate all the feedback and thanks for the welcome! I think the brew went as well as it could on Sunday. We steeped in about 2 gallons, which seemed to be ok. Ipas: That is one of the main lessons I learned, we could have been heating the remaining water on the side while steeping to save a ton of time! jbakajust: You were dead on, we had a pretty late night and didn'it pitch until about 11:30. Luckily, I borrowed a wort chiller so that helped out tremendously. It was all worth it though. The airlock is bubbling nicely and the closet that our fermentor is in smells insanely good. I just want to lock myslef in there all day and hang out with my fermentor. I'll let you all know how it ends up, but I'm sure I'll have other questions along the process. Thanks.
No real deal, as long as you have your sanitation down pat, you shouldn't run the risk of exposing the wort to bad shit, before the good shit gets to chow down. Cool your wort down like you normally would, and put it in your fermentation chamber, or if you use a bucket with cold water/ice, ala the cheap swamp cooler, then do that. Put the beer in the primary fermenter, put the airlock on it, and leave it be for the short period of time until you can pitch. You'll double the good factor, in that you'll have the wort at a constant temp by letting it sit at the fermentation temp, and you can pitch the starter or dry yeast at the temps you want. Don't wait too long, I've never gone more than a day myself, but I have brewed late once and was so tired, I just left it be until I got home from work that Monday evening, and pitched the yeast. Worked out just fine.
