First all grain brew, help!

[mitten]

Hey guys.

I decided a while ago I wanted to do a mini-mash. I have a good idea how to do it now, and I have all the ingredients and kit I need. (bar one stock pot which I'll borrow when I need it).

My problem is that I'm not sure what to brew!

I was originally planning a pale ale, then a stout. I would love to do either, or and IPA if possible. I have alot of grains to use. (23lt brew btw)

Grains;

1kg Crystal
500g Maris Otter
1500g Optic
500g Chocolate
500g Dark Crystal
500g Amber
500g Brown
500g Belgian Pale

Hops;

100g Goldings
100g Cascade
100g Fuggles

Can someone suggest a beer to make, and some advice on what malts to use?

(my grains are all ground btw)

Thanks

[Dennis King]

for your 1st one I would keep it simple, one of my stock beers is 4250gm pale malt and 250gm crystal.
hops around 30-40gm of both fuggles and goldings.
its down to what you want but this is a tried and tested recipe I`ve enjoyed for years, simple but tasty English ale.

[raiderman]

The great thing about home brewing is that once you've done a few its easy. I agree with Dennis keep your first few brews simple and that way you get to learn he mechanics, Then you can look to expand your range of beers or start experimenting with different hops and malts.
Your ingredient list is short on pale malt. The marris otter and optic only give you 2kg and you need around 4.5kg of fermentables. You could combine some of your other malts but they'd loose their individuality. I'd get some more pale malt and then brew.
Dennis recipe will make 23l of straightforward bitter, easy to brew and enjoyable to drink. A great introduction. The crystal malt will give a little colour and flavour, as you'd expect from a brown as opposed to a straw coloured bitter. The hops are classic and won't let you down

[trucker5774]

I agree with both replies................get some more marris otter and add the other malts one at a time as you do more brews to appreciate the changes.

[beer gut]

I think when you first start all grain brewing it's good too stick to the saying learn to walk before you can learn to run.What iam trying to say is the more simple it is the less things can go wrong.What i would recomend for a pale ale grain bill is 90% pale malt, 3% wheat malt, 7% torrified wheat for your hops i would recomend some challenger hop as your bittering hop, use east kent goldings as your aroma hop(add goldings last ten mins of the boil).This is a basic pale ale recipe that is very simple yet affective, wheat malt promotes body in pale beers and it helps to create foam for the foamy head, the torrified wheat helps to hold a cramy head and helps lacing on the glass.I would say i good strike heat is 75c this way once you have added your grains to the kettle the temp of your mash liqour should drop down to 65c this a perfect infusion mash temp, this way you should get a good balance of a amalase b amalase ie maltose sugar and dextrin sugars.I hope my rambling has helped.

[mitten]

Hey guys, thanks for the responses. Very helpful. (sorry for the late reply)

I've decided I'm going to cut the size of my mash by around half. Instead of using my 23lt fermentation vessel I'm going to use 2 x 5lt demi jars as FV's. This is for two reasons. One, I have a very small stock pot, nowhere near big enough for 4.5kg of grain. Two, it allows me to experiment a bit more. If I can brew only five litres of beer at a time it means I can play with the recipies a bit and experiment, and not risk ending up with 23lt of crap beer! Know what I mean?

Okay so anyways, now I'm going to use 1500g of Optic malt, 500g of Maris Otter and maybe 300g - 500g of specialty grains. Maybe Belgian, amber or brown...?
I couldn't get a hold of any wheat so I'll have to leave that until next time.

Can anyone give me any feedback on my plans?

[beer gut]

It's great to hear that you are planning your first reciepe.The only advice i would give using specilist grain German or Beligum grain is there are less modified than the british barly.What this means is they don't have the same enzyme quality as the britsh so how we deal with this you have to add your grain at a much lower strike heat normally between 35c and 45c you then have to mash that for 30mins to 45mins and then then drain some wort off into sterile pan and boil that wort up. you then add that boiled wort to your mash and gently raise the temp of your mash up to 65c /66c for 1 hour/ 1hr and half hours if you are not sure that all the starch hass been transformed into sugar there is a easy test can be done using iodine.The big risk of all this is some times the well modified grain like optic can react real bad with the step mash like when you come to sparge the grain you get a real thick gunky sparge the other side is if you don't do the step mash you might not get the mash efficency that you want therefor not getting the starting gravitey that you expected to achive.I don't want to be all doom and gloom caus i strongly believe in expermenting i think this is the key to new flavours and award winning ales all iam saying is becarefull caus i have fell into this trap myself a few times. happy brewing

[mitten]

Thanks for that man, I'll keep that in mind. Probably going to go down the simpler route.

Can I please get some more advice?

Planning on doing this tomorrow.

If I use 1500g optic, and 500g of maris otter and possibly 200g of amber how long should I boil for? Also I heard after sparging it's wise to boil again. If so how long should I boil for and at what temp?

EDIT:

Going to use 1350g of Optic, 170g of Crystal and 70g of Brown or Amber malt.

I'm planning to mash in my pot for about 50 minutes at between 53-56 degrees. After this I'm going to transfer through a sieve into a second pot (and sparge the grains).
I'm going add some hops (not sure how much to add. How does 5g fuggles and 4g of goldings sound?) Anyways yeah I'll add the hops and boil for another 15 minutes. After the boil I'll chill in an ice bath. (also, I'm using hop pellets, do these disolve in the wort or will I need to sieve them out)

After chilling I'll transfer it to the FV and pitch 1/3 sachet of youngs ale yeast.

How does this sound guys? Really need some feedback on this

ta

[Deebee]

Thanks for that man, I'll keep that in mind. Probably going to go down the simpler route.

Can I please get some more advice?

Planning on doing this tomorrow.

If I use 1500g optic, and 500g of maris otter and possibly 200g of amber how long should I boil for? Also I heard after sparging it's wise to boil again. If so how long should I boil for and at what temp?

EDIT:

Going to use 1350g of Optic, 170g of Crystal and 70g of Brown or Amber malt.

I'm planning to mash in my pot for about 50 minutes at between 53-56 degrees. After this I'm going to transfer through a sieve into a second pot (and sparge the grains).
I'm going add some hops (not sure how much to add. How does 5g fuggles and 4g of goldings sound?) Anyways yeah I'll add the hops and boil for another 15 minutes. After the boil I'll chill in an ice bath. (also, I'm using hop pellets, do these disolve in the wort or will I need to sieve them out)

After chilling I'll transfer it to the FV and pitch 1/3 sachet of youngs ale yeast.

How does this sound guys? Really need some feedback on this

ta

Hi. And welcome to the madhouse.

I can't answer the technical questions regarding mini mashing but i can gove the following advice or opinions if you will.

As per the others advice i would keep the recipe very very simple.

For my first i think i would go either for just a pale ale brew and a single hop ( a so called SMaSH( Single Malt and Single Hop)).In this case i would use either fuggles or goldings to around 25 IBU at the start of the boil, then 10-12 IBu with 10 minutes left.

using pellets is not a problem, they will disolve into very fine particlas and you will have little chance of removing them. before i had a filter i put the hops into muslim bags ( or tubegauze) with the ends tied, and most of the gunk from the dissolved hops stayed put in the bags after i drained out.

As for your yeast, to be honest overpitching with dry yeast is really difficult to do I would rather overpitch than underpitch.
underpitching can stress the yeast and result in off tastes. in addition, the sooner the fermentation starts the beter. Shorter lag time means less chance f nasties getting into the brew and destroying it.

If you wat to be a litte more adventurous you could divide the collected wort in 2 and boil half with one set of hops, and the other with another. The end result will be two totally different beers from the same starting point. It will give you an idea as to how different hops work.

Remember to post pics in the brewdays forum too

There are no silly questions only silly answers so ask and the wealth of knowledge here will without doubt be able to help out.

good luck.

[Brotherton Lad]

Have a quick look at Norman's recipes:

viewtopic.php?p=2377#2377

Scale them down to your size. You'll quickly get a feel for combining malts and hops in the right proportions.