New to AG and have a couple of questions??

[BrewHogDeluxe]

I'm new to AG with having done one batch I have a couple of questions.

First let me start with my set up. I have two keggles, one as my boil pot and the other as my hot water reservoir and I'm using a 10 gallon cooler as my mash tun.



Questions:

1) Can I brew a 10 gallon batch using this cooler?



2) I preheated my cooler with boiling water but as I added my grains and hot water during the mash the temp seemed to drop off real fast and I had to keep adding hot water to finally get my mash temp. Should I add hotter than 165 F water to begin with when stirring in grains? I used 1.25 quarts per pound of grains but had to add more to get the temp up.



Any help is much appreciated

 

[adixon3]

1) Yes, you can but you would have to dial in your process to get better efficiency to compensate for the limited space or keep a bag of DME on hand

2) You didn't take in to consideration the grain temperture

 

[skiingimpy]

Doing a 10 gallon batch typically requires a 12 ish gallon boil. Depending on how your keggle is cut, that's going to be really tight. A 10 gallon cooler should get you enough grain for some 10 gallon batches, but probably not big ones. You'll probably want to do some 5 (or 7.5) gallon batches to get your process figured out and to understand what the issues and limitations with going big will be. The biggest will be getting through the hot break without boiling over and coating the side of your keggle with hot, sticky, scorched wort.

http://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml is a site that I really like for getting all the mash calculations done. Just put in your info and it will spit out how hot your water needs to be. You can definitely go hotter than 165, but make sure you get all the grain into the water quickly so you don't denature any enzymes before it cools and stabilizes at your mash temp. Or add water to the grain so you don't overshoot.


Sent from my iPad using Home Brew

 

[masonsjax]

You should be able to mash a lot of 10 gallon batches in that cooler. For big beers you might need to substitute some of the base malt for extract or cane sugar to get it to fit.

I like to add my strike water to the tun at around 180F to preheat it. I then let it cool to the strike temperature which is calculated based on my grain temperature via an online calculator as noted in a previous post. It's a real drag trying to add more hot water just to hit your mash temp.