I am going to brew the Irish Red Ale again, this time all grain. I will play around with it on Beer Smith, but my basic question is, if I want to slightly extend the batch, maybe just get a pre-boil volume of 8 gal instead of 7.3… my thought was to add a pound of base malt to the mash so I ordered a pound of Rahr Pale Ale Malt (crushed) to hopefully expand the boil volume without being watered down.
Am I thinking about this correctly? What I am hoping to achieve is to get a good volume in the end, after adding hops, cooling, and fermenting. I would like to not be trying to strain the bottom part of the wort into the fermenter. I think i may have done too much of that with my dead ringer IPA. Do you guys leave much sitting on the bottom of the boil kettle? I always feel if I leave it all I am leaving behind the “flavor” but I may be causing more issues by taking a little too much of that “character” into the fermenter. When you are racking out of the primary (to a keg or a bottling bucket) how much do you leave behind, meaning do you try to get all the liquid (not the yeast) you can tilting the primary etc. ? I think sometimes my desire for getting all I can is causing me to perhaps take some of the chewy stuff that would be best left behind. It would be nice to have enough to draw from that I can just hold the racking cane off the bottom and take mostly clean stuff into my keg or secondary.
Before chilling the hot wort down, I would use your sanitized spoon, and quietly stir the pot for 10 minutes, provided your arm can handle that… Alot of the trub and hopefully hot break, will make a cone in the middle of the kettle… time to rack/tranfer. Then after you’re done whatever you do for a fermenting schedule, if you have the ability, put it in a 32* chamber, leave it there for a few days…When you’re ready to bottle/ keg, carefully take it out and put it where you usually rack from, have the packaging vessel ready to receive the chilled wort, and yes, use a hunk of 2x material to tilt the chilled container. I will follow the top of the beer down and watch my tubing… You’ll find out how far you can go after doing a couple of racking’s… Sneezles61
Excellent ! Thank you for that ! I had to read a couple of times to figure out the “32* chamber” was a cold crash… I was thinking it was yet again another piece of brew equipment that I didn’t have. But I have a 10 cu ft chest freezer and inkbird temp controller so I can definitely do that.
Do you think I should give the kama citra a couple of days in the cold chamber before racking to the keg as well (why not I guess) ? I have never tried that before.
Something else I’ve found to be incredibly helpful in getting most of the liquid and not stirring up the trub is a clip on the autosiphon. Makes it easy to follow the liquid without getting hand cramps and stirring the beer.
