Planning first all grain batch

I completely screwed up my first honey brown, dry as a desert.

I digress, assuming that you are adding honey, mash on the warmer end and pick a good honey (any particular honey?). I like to add honey a few days into primary rather than the boil in any way. A solid brown ale recipe should suffice unless you want to go crazy.

 

Practice heating your tun a couple times. I realize you won't add grain each time, but figure out what it absorbs for heat, so you don't have a panic attack when you are trying to hit mash temp. Be prepared to learn the love hate relationship that is mash efficiency, until you learn your system. Even then, you will probably look to get a grain mill so you know you are consistent going into your tun (except for yearly changes in grain). If your water is good enough, do worry about water additions yet. I have been all grain brewing for over a year and feel that it is still something that seems odd. In the end, I feel it is a more enjoyable brew day, but can require a few extra homebrews while figuring it out. Good luck.

 

Don’t expect to detect any honey whatsoever...

 

Regarding first all-grain brewing: you really don't know your efficiency, but take a "best" guess. Same with starting volume of wort to be boiled. Have plenty of extra hot water when you start your mash. Be ready for a slight temp drop when stirring (I add hot water each stir session). Have an accurate method to measure volume of wort in kettle. Same with sparging, have some extra water laying around. No such thing as too much hot water during each step (you'll figure it all out in time).

Now for the sage part: Keep the bag your grain came in, this is where you'll shovel the spent grain . . . hopefully you have a goat that will enjoy it.

 

If not a goat, then compost it or dump the spent grain in the woods, critters will clean it up.

Definatly have some extra hot water available when mashing.

Don't b in a rush.

Keep a log book you can look back on for future reference.

Have fun

 

Something that I wish I'd started doing a lot earlier - write everything down. A consistent, predictable, reproducible process is a great thing to have if you want stress-free brewdays and control over your beer, and I was far too slow to realize that I'd got into a vicious cycle of unpredictability where I was doing all sorts of on-the-fly adjustments (extra sparge water, longer boils, top-up water etc) to get the OG that I was aiming for and that that was helping to make my process even less predictable and even less consistent.

This seems to have been improving massively since I've started a spreadsheet where I measure and record pretty much everything - so, off the top of my head, grain mass, strike water volume, any later mash additions, first running gravity, sparge water volume, pre-boil volume, pre-boil gravity, post-boil volume, post-boil gravity, amount transferred to fermenter, any top-up water, OG in fermenter all get written down, and I have a fairly solid idea of how on-track any given brew is at any given point.

 

Two pieces of advice.

First, have some rice hulls on hand. For an all-malt beer you really shouldn't need them, but they are cheap insurance in case you get a stuck mash.

Second, if you care about head retention, do a good vorlauf. For years my head retention was shit. This was partly because my beers weren't very hoppy (hops are very pro-foam), and some were sour (very rare to see a sour beer with good head), but mostly it was because my vorlauf was anemic. I would recirculate maybe 2 quarts. Certainly I was getting the wort to the point where there weren't big chunks of grain, but there are lipids in malt and I wasn't doing an effective job of filtering those out. As a result, even my clean beers had very crappy head.

A little while ago I invested in a RipTide pump and started recirculating my mash for 10 minutes before transferring to the kettle. The wort that goes into my kettle is beautifully clear, and at this point my beers have too much head formation/retention. If I don't pour very slowly down the side of the glass, the glass will be full of foam before the bottle is all poured. I'm very confident this is because I'm filtering out a lot of the lipids during recirculation. (Note that the yeast want some lipids, but with homebrew equipment you will never get your wort so clear that they don't have enough.)

Now a RipTide pump is expensive, I'm not saying you need it. But I think you'll find that a good vorlauf is a (somewhat) easy way to improve head formation.

Bonus advice: Consider using a high-quality mesh bag (of the kind used for brew-in-a-bag) inside your mash tun. The extra filtration will help with the vorlauf process described above, and if you get a stuck mash you can just lift the bag to drain. It should also make cleanup easier. When I say high-quality I mean one of the ones sold here or here.

 

When are you planning to add the honey, and what are you looking for by adding it?

Here’s an American Brown Ale recipe that received input from many BA homebrewers:
https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/averagely-perfect-american-brown-ale-ag.615253/

 

my thoughts on this experiment are.... don't.
For the first AG brew, go simple, just run a single fermentation, get the basics out of the way before you start going crazy on things.
A honey brown should be a fairly foolproof brew to go for the first time - you don't want to get too ambitious.
Also, for the moment, don't worry too much about water additions and corrections - like I said, get the basics down first. Worry about one thing at a time.
Not saying that dialing in your water won't make a difference (how much of one is up for discussion) but as long as you can drink the tap water and not detect chlorine, minerals etc, it's good enough for brewing for now.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by "not detect chlorine," but if you mean don't worry about chlorine if you can't smell it or taste it out of the tap, I disagree. Chlorines/chloramines need to be removed. OTOH, if you meant "doesn't have chlorine (or chloramines)", I agree.

 

If @darklager can achieve a proper mash pH with his water and grain bill I agree with you here. If not, then some adjustment (e.g., add some lactic acid) should be made otherwise there could be issues (e.g., astringency).

Cheers!