Help! Brewing tomorrow and I have a problem!

No. Multiply the grains by 1.5 and use that many quarts of water at about 162℉ will land you somewhere between 150-156℉. Put the grains in a sack and put in the water in the kettle or a small cooler and hold for 45-60 minutes. You can add a small amount of cold water to bring it down closer to 150℉ if needed. After the 45-60 minutes remove the bag of grain, drain into whatever vessel you had it in, drain liquid to your kettle (if you don't have it in the kettle already), add water, add extract, start boil, proceed with your recipe.

 

^^^ Agreed. If you need help keeping your mash warm, you can stick it in the oven. Just back it to warm for a few minutes and turn the oven off as you put your kettle in there. Remove one of the racks, and put the other rack on the bottom. Careful when you get your mash out. Those handles are hot. Do a check with an empty kettle to make sure it fits in the oven first!

 

What they are describing is a way of all grain brewing called brew in a bag (BIAB). You should research it a little bit and try one of the free calculators, like BrewCipher, before you add more extract to grains you were originally going to steep only.

 

Also, I'm just making sure you know this since you're fairly new to brewing, when you're draining your grain bag, DO NOT SQUEEZE IT. This will release a ton of harsh tannins that will only harm your beer. Also, you might want to rinse your grain bag with some hot water to strip any remaining sugars off of those grains. Patience is going to be key.

 

That's a myth, squeezing isn't going to extract tannins, feel free to squeeze every ounce out of that bag.

 

More applicable to hops, but really is temperature dependent mostly

 

Was thinking the same thing. In fact a few breweries are starting to use a wort filter to get as much water out of the grain as possible.

 

If you brew with grain you have to filter. What type of filter are you seeing from these breweries?

 

I think I've read about this 'myth' although not in reference to tannins but to starches being squeezed from the grains. Maybe that was the point that was trying to be made.

 

I've been brewing all grain for ten years and have never filtered, except through the grain bed. When just starting out and extract brewing, I didn't filter either. Most everything dropped out as trub in the boil or fell out when the yeast floced in the fermenter.

But, I may have mis-understood your post.

 

Agreed. Granted, I've only done one BIAB batch, but I squeezed the heck out of the bag and got no tannins. Also, I squeeze the heck out of my DH bags. I want that goodness.

 

They were talking about somehow filtering the remaining trapped wort from the grist after the lauter. (Not later in the process.) Personally, I've never heard of a brewery using anything but gravity through the grain bed, but I'm interested to hear what @holzwama is referring to.

 

Ok, finally found an online story on it.
http://heavytable.com/modist-brewing/

I initially read about this in an article about water conservation and brewing. Always cool stuff.

The 2 beers I had last week from there were great. Cool place too. Fun to see people trying "new stuff" when brewing.

 

Interesting

 

Mash filters have been around for a long time. The usual set up uses a hammer mill to make flour of the endosperm, and the husks are discarded, so no tannins when the mash is pressed.

 

WHICH IS IT!?!?

Congratulations, you're a partial masher now. Don't look back.

 

This was my question. Reminds me of the time a real jerk I was forced to spend a lot of time with was bragging about all the girls he'd slept with. I asked how many - his response: A few... you'd think a guy might remember the specifics