First Ever Brew. All Grain, no pain (a little pain)

Hi everyone,

I've read a few posts so far but not contributed anything. I thought I'd write an entry about my first ever foray into brewing. I'm hoping that the knowledgeable community out there will easily be able to spot any mistakes I've made or things I can do better.

It is safe to say that I am a complete beginner at this, having only brewed tea before. I might have been a bit stupid to attempt an all grain brew straight away but nothing ventured..

I've tried to upload photos showing the gear I'm using. This includes:

A 20 litre boil pot
A cooler converted to mash tun
A copper heat exchange
A brew kit including fermenter, second bucket, hydrometer, Stirring.. wand? Baton? Paddle?
Also most of the odds and ends like thermometer, no rinse sanitiser, pipe.

The mash tun and heat exchange I made based on video guides (if any one would like links let me know)

I bought bottled water as, if the condition of our kettle is anything to go by, the water in this area is ridiculously hard.

I heated 16l of the water to 72C. This was poured into the mash tun just after I'd remembered to close the ball valve. Into this I added:

3 Kg of Marris Otter
500g of Cara Amber Malt
500g of Mild Malt.

By the time the grain had gone in the mash temp was down to 66.5C.

I let this sit for 60 minutes (after this time the temp was 65.5C ) and, after the flow was free of bits, began to sparge with 8l of water. I first tried a continuous sparge but, about half way through, the wort was running very clear. I decided to add the rest and let it sit for a while while I had a sandwich (ham and cheese, but I'm not expecting this to affect the beer). Once it was running clear again I let the rest drain out.

During the heating of the Wort I was waiting, hand primed on the temperature control, for the hot break to kick in and send burning hot foam everywhere. As far as I can tell this didn't happen. As a result the wort was boiling for a lot longer than it needed to be before the hops went in.

I picked hops based on descriptions that I liked the sound of. My aim with this brew is to end up with a quite easy going, average, beer that I can use as a base line for future attempts. The Hop combination is:

60 minutes:
East Kent Goldings: 25g
Challenger: 25g

15 minutes:
East Kent Goldings: 15g
Challenger: 15g

On the second hop addition I put my heat exchange in to sterilise. Once the full time was up I set the heat exchange going and, at the same time, watered the garden. It got from about 100C to 30c in 5-10 minutes. I realised midway through the cooling that I had meant to add a spoon full of biersol at the end of the boil. I sterilised a spoon and added this while the beer was at about 50C. I'm hoping this wont be catastrophic.

Once it was transferred to the sanitised fermenter I added the yeast: Mangrove Jack M79 Burton Union.

It's currently sitting in an unused room of the house waiting for some movement in the air lock.



I'd be really interested to see if anyone can predict what type of beer the final product will be as I haven't really got a clue.

The hydrometer reading when going into the fermenter was 1.057 and had been 1.049 before boiling (those are both already temperature corrected).

Unfortunately the final volume is only around 13L. I think I may have to find a better boiling device to make larger batches.

Top marks for remembering to shut the tun valve.. we have all Not done that at least once
looks like a very successful first brew, congratulations, my first effort went wrong every way possible.


a bigger boil pot is a must

May I suggest you bend down the feed tubes of your chiller down more to encourage any condensation on the tube to drip down and out away from the beer,
as it is now you could get a little condensation running back into the beer.

Not a biggy but it sounds like your l little confused about hot break and initial boil foaming, The hot break will occur during the boil, while the boil may foam up when it first starts,
i caught a whitelabs 7 part how to make a starter vid with the same error in it??

you can just see the hotbreak forming in this dme solution, no foam, and its after about 45mins simmering (preping a clear dme solution for slants n plates)


just the first of many successful brewdays

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm definitely considering getting something larger to boil in. Pans are so expensive so I might have to look into alternative methods.

I'll see if i can get a better bend on the copper without putting a kink in it (i'm a bit ham-fisted) I got lucky with no leaks or condensation run off this time.

That picture's really reassuring, not only because it means that there was a hotbreak but it also explains the presence of what i thought was some sort of scum during boiling.