Full size all-grain batch

After my initial experiments with 'brew in a bag' I thought I'd see how far I could take it, and whether it was possible to put together 23 litres of a 5% ish brew without needing to buy another, bigger pot. After some reading up I found that the largest grain bill that people normally use with a 19l pot is around 5 1/2 kg, so I decided on 5kg of Marris Otter & 1/2 kg of un-malted wheat berries

That took about half an hour to grind, and I added a few teaspoons of dark malt to bring a bit of colour 

It left a bit of a mess in the kitchen as well...

In the meantime I bought 17l of water up to around 78 degrees C in the stock pot. Once I hit the right temperature I took out around 3.5l in a jug and kept that close to the pot along with a 2l bottle of room temperature water and a freshly boiled kettle. I put in the brew bag, tipped in the grains, mixed well and then used the various water containers to top up the pot as much as possible whilst trying to hit around 68 degrees C

When I hit the right temperature I covered the pot in a couple of sleeping bags (yes, that is the bag I carefully washed last week laying on the dusty concrete floor) and left it for 90 minutes

At this point the classical texts say 'kick back and have a homebrew' but I had a kitchen to clean & mop

After a 90 min mash I lifted the bag and drained into the pot whilst squeezing the bag, then left it to hang and drain thoroughly.  This gave me around 10l of wort at around 1.080

As a time saving measure I put the initial wort on the heat straight away, whilst I sparged the bag in 60 degree C water for 10 minutes before hanging and draining in the same way. I'm using the table to shield the pot from the wind.  I also threw the first batch of hops into the wort before it came to the boil - this is known as first-wort hopping and adds a deeper flavour to the beer.

Once the sparge was complete I had around 8l of 1.020 gravity wort. I added as much liquid as possible to the pot and carefully let it come back to the boil. This is another reason to first-wort hop - if you had a completely full pot of wort on the boil and through in hops at that point then you'd probably get a boil-over.

To make sure I pulled all of the sugars out of the grain I carried out a second sparge with room temperature water and hung & drained the bag again. This gave me around 6l of very weak wort (1.014 gravity), and so after the main wort was boiled, hopped, cooled and strained in the usual way I added this weak wort to the fermenter to bring up the volume. Don't forget to boil it first to sterilise it though.

After all this I ended up with around 20l of wort with a gravity of 1.052, and I added a litre of water to bring it up to 21l (that volume works better with my secondaries) at a gravity of 1.050. This will give me a roughly 5.5% brew if it ferments out all the way out to dry. This is a bit disappointing as it shows I'm only accessing around 65% of the sugars that are available in the grain. I'm doing all I can to pull out available sugars so I think that the issue lay in the coarseness of my original grind. Next time I will grind a lot finer and run the grains through twice. And I'll set the grinder up outside so I can get way with leaving the cleaning to the local wildlife...