Hi all, I've been brewing extract for about a year now, and while I still have a lot to learn, I wanted to start moving toward all grain. My plan is to start with a one gallon BIAB saison recipe. I've been searching the internet as well as John Palmer's How to Brew but I am still a little uncertain about how to determine the temperature and time needed for the mash. I am also struggling to determine how much water to use pre boil but it looks like a large part of this will be determined after I figure out how much boil off to expect. Ultimately I will have to just try it out and see how it goes but I wanted to reach out to this community to see if I could get any advice first. Thanks!
BIAB is easy for multiple reasons. Once you figure out what you want figure out what you want almost any brewing software (some of which is free like BrewCipher here in these forums). You will eventually need to tweet stuff based on you setup but it will ball park you close enough. I can't help you on a recipe for this style, but I am sure many here can. Temperature is easy, and typically more of a you preference. For lighter beers I typically do 150, but have gone lower and a littler high based on experience for the beer. For heavier/thicker beers, I tend to go with 158 or so. I believe saisons are supposed to be dry, so 148-150 would be the place to be. Time, just go with 60 minutes until you feel like playing around with shorter or longer mashes. Amount of water is greatly affected by your boil off rate, so you need to figure that out. Put two or three gallons in the pot you intend to boil in and boil it for an hour, measure how much is left at the end, and you have this figure. The next trick is to make sure your grain absorption is, and I can't help a lot here, but typically BrewCipher puts me brews around 1.5 cup per pound of grain, but that is based on my tweekings of the software for me. Hope that helps some, and other can point out anything that is missing/wrong.
Thanks for the help. I will definitely have to play around with the recipe. Looking at the biab calculator I am now realizing my 2 gallon kettle will not be large enough so I will have to add a sparge step. Trial and error in addition to reading up on brewing techniques will get me there eventually.
