All Grain Brew Day | BIAB | New Brew Bag | PH Mistake!

Today I get to say goodbye to my old brew bag that's full of holes! It served me well for 6 mashes but it's time to retire it as I've got a new bag to try out that's hopefully going to be the last brew bag I will ever need! My old bag cost me $8 and was advertised as a "Top Shelf" polyester brew bag with reinforced webbing but sadly I only got 6 brews out of and on my last brew day it leaked nearly a cup full of grain into my kettle, so much for top shelf! The bag I just purchased is called the Brew Bag and it has flown halfway around the world to be here, and it cost me a whopping $82! So why on earth would anyone spend that much money on a nylon brew bag? Well I could buy 9 of the cheap ones and get at least 54 brews from them for the same cost, but there's also another issue I was having with my old brew bag, and that was poor efficiency thanks to the very fine 65 micron mesh that it was made from. It had the tendency to trap in a lot of sugars and meant that I had to squeeze the life out of it on every brew day. My new bag on the other hand has a much coarser 400 micron mesh which holds all your grain in just as well but breathes much better allowing the sugary wort to escape into the kettle more easily!

Opening the brew bag for the first time instantly reveals why this handmade, heavy duty bag was worth the cost. Its stitched better than my old bag and feels thicker and tougher and is super rigid for a flexible polyester bag and the nearly 600 five start reviews of this bag can't be wrong! But before I get too far ahead of myself I need to put it to the test and get my mash going.

The beer I'm brewing today is my house pale ale that I've been tweaking now for 6 iterations. The malt bill is slightly smaller than my previous batches and I've also changed the hopping schedule as well as the hops themselves for this beer. This time I'll be using Enigma and Galaxy for my hops in the hope that I can overcome a serious flavour problem that I encountered in my fourth and fifth batches of beer. My 4th batch had a nasty aroma and flavour that left a bad after taste that was undrinkable and I narrowed the problem down to the hops I was using which was a new 2019 batch of Vic Secret packaged by a particular Australian supplier. So with this beer I've swapped out the Vic Secret for Galaxy instead and I've also swapped my bittering hop from Magnum to Chinook just in case my Magnum had gotten too old as I've been using the same 500gm bag now for 10 months. This will also be my first pale ale that doesn’t have a whirlpool hop edition so today I'll only be adding my bittering hops at 60 minutes, then I will be dry hopping at day 5/6 depending on how fast the fermentation goes.

As usual I've treated all my brewing water together in the kettle according to my desired profile on Brun Water and once the water reaches my mash temperature I remove the sparging or rinsing water for later use and get the mash going. For this beer im shooting for 69ppm of Calcium with 96ppm of Sulphate and 69ppm of Chloride for a 1.6/1 Sulphate to Chloride ratio. The first thing I notice about the brew bag is that its pretty stiff, unlike my old bag which I could easily fold and stretch over the sides of my kettle, this bag is just not cooperating. The lid clamps on my kettle are sticking out too far for the bag to stretch over so after a bit of fiddling around I find that I can fold the top of the bag over itself first and then over the rim of the kettle. And in fact its so rigid that it does even need clamps to hold it on!

The grain bill for this beer has been slowly evolving over time. My original batch had 4.5kg of base Ale Malt with 10% crystal and 5% wheat but as I have improved my efficiency I've been able to reduce my base malt down to only 3.5kg. This along with west coast ale yeast should hopefully get me close to a 5% beer which is the sweet spot in my opinion for a quaffable pale ale.

The mash-in goes well with no issues and now it's time to set up my pump and get my wort recirculating. When I order the brew bag I had the choice of either 200 micron mesh which was recommended for static brew in the bag setups, or 400 micron mesh which was recommended for recirculating mash setups. I chose the 400 micron mesh for my system so I could recirculate without the risk of creating suckdown in my bag due to the wort not flowing through the mesh fast enough for the pump. That happened to me with my old brew bag and I nearly complete crushed the false bottom in my kettle!

While the mash is happening I have a bit of time now so I do some maintenance on my wort chiller and at the 15 minute mark I take a sample of the wort to test my PH level. For this beer I've added 2ml of phosphoric acid to my mash water which is a bit more than my previous beer, but when I test the wort at 15 minutes the PH level is almost exactly the same as the last time! At the time I was scratching my head and wondering how I could add more acid and have nearly the same PH level and it wasn’t until I was reviewing the footage from my brew day that I realised my mistake. I added my acid addition for my mash to my total water volume and then drained 12 litres out for my sparge instead of adding it after I drained the sparge water out! So I had actually diluted the acid addition down as my water volume was 50% more than it was supposed to be! Oh well at least I realised what went wrong and hopefully I pay better attention next time!

At the end of the mash it's time to pull the bag and see how it goes rinsing it for the first time and it goes very well. The extra rigidity in the bag really helps with keeping it under control as I lift it out of the kettle, and it also helps with putting pressure on the grains as I twist it to squeeze out all the extra fluid. In fact this was probably the easiest sparge I've done since I started all grain brewing and to top it off the spent grains literally slide out of the bag like it's made of teflon and the clean-up was by far the easiest I've ever had with a grain bag! Its also good to no grains left in the kettle as its coming up to the boil! Once my wort is boiling I add my bittering hop addition for 60 minutes and for this pale ale I've chosen Chinook. Up until this point I've been using magnum for all my bittering and last year I purchased a 500gm bag to save me money but it's over a year old now and I'm not even half way through thanks to its high alpha acid content. It's still good to use but I've started wanting to experiment more with my bittering hops so unless I start drinking a ton of lagers anytime soon I may just have to see how long it can last in my freezer! Another change I made with this beer is I won't be doing a whirlpool addition, instead I'll be adding dry hops around day 5 to 6 instead which will consist of 50gm of Galaxy and 25gm of Enigma.

So with no whirlpool to do I turn straight to chilling the beer. I manage to chill it down to 24 degrees Celsius in about 40 minutes with my inline chiller. It's not as efficient as I'd like but I have to remind myself that it's still an experiment to see if I can chill my beer with the least amount of money spent and so far its doing ok but there's still room to improve. Near the end of the chilling process I suddenly realise that I forgot to put whirlfloc in at 10 minutes, oops! I guess I will be buying a packet of gelatine for later on then. Once the beer is chilled its straight into my regular fermenter then into my fermenting fridge where I will pitch BR-97 west coast ale yeast and let it ferment out!

Until Next Time, Cheers and happy brewing!