Hi BA homebrewing land. I'm fairly new to brewing and I've got a couple of questions - wondering if maybe I can get some advice from more experienced home brewers: 1) Thinking about trying all grain brewing (been extract brewing for a few months now) but not wanting to spend the money on buying extra equipment just yet. Wondering if I can mash and sparge my grains in a grain bag as opposed to buying a false bottom kettle thing to put inside my larger kettle? 2) I brewed some beers with Belgian yeasts and now my fermenting bucket permanently smells like these saison and abbey yeasts. I wash it and sanitize it, but it still smells. Is it safe to go back to brewing a DIPA in the same bucket? Is there still yeast in there that's going to affect the flavor of my new beers? Thanks in advance for your help!
Search "brew in a bag" for ways to do a mini-mash in a paint strainer bag. Many people use this technique with great success. I think as long as you didn't use bugs (brett, lacto, pedio etc) you should be fine to reuse those buckets on an IPA. My buckets also have an aroma that doesn't completely go away. I use them anyway.
I started doing mini mashes instead of just steeping grains as a baby step on my way to all grain. Seriously, the beers that you can make changing the recipie from a steep to a mini mash are head and shoulders above just steeping.
There are multiple ways to estimate without actually doing the math yourself. For instance, Hopville, various sites that sell ingredients (brewmasterswarehouse.com), and beersmith software all provide ways to estimate OG. I have found that they don't match exactly, but they're close enough.
The math for estimating the OG from the mini-mash portion of a recipe is exactly the same math as used in a full mash. Of course, you also have to calculate the fermentables coming from your LME and/or DME for the rest of the OG. Most of the software out there probably handles this well enough.
I have an app on my phone called brewr that helps me build recipes. It's free and the math is pretty right on. You can adjust your efficiency percentages and it has a pretty healthy list of grains and hops and gives you the ability to modify ppg and aau's. It's pretty great for free. Also gives you stats on beer styles.
