Critique my first AG brew day, and a bit of beersmith help?

Mashing
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Hi all. I’ve been lurking for quite some time, and I appreciate all of the valuable information on here. I have been extract brewing for about 5 years, and last night was my first foray into All-grain brewing. I chose an oatmeal stout simply because it is an easy style and I wouldn’t have to worry about color or clarity for the first go-around.

I used beerSmith and followed their advice for the most part, but I admit that I flew by the seat of my pants, so to speak, on a couple of items. I’d just like to summarize what I did and see if you all can point to some streamlining of my schedule. Any assistance is appreciated-

Mash in- I used 11.25qts for a 9lb grainbill. I was too warm on strikewater and the mash temp went to 158 before adding .25qt of cold water to bring it to 153. I mashed at 153 for 60 minutes.

I measured my runoff to see what my grain absorption was and am a little surprised- 6.5qt of wort collected. That works out to be .14gal/lb absorption rate, which seems to be high compared with Denny’s suggested .1gal/lb guideline. Is this OK?

Regardless, I followed beersmith’s volumes for batch sparging and did a 2 step batch sparge with 10min soak time for each (not sure if this is correct, but it seemed most logical?).

Pre-boil gravity was 1.044.

All told, I ended up with 6.5gal of wort, did a standard 60min boil and ended up collecting 5.5gal of 1.048 wort for fermentation, which according to beersmith is dead-on for OG, even though I collected .5gal more than I should have I suppose.

My questions- Is this protocol OK? Would you change anything?

And finally, how do I change the values in beersmith to correct for my boil evaporation rate (less than default), and grain absorption (higher than default), or would you leave them alone for the time being until I do more batches?

Thanks again for any advice. I’m real excited because I feel that my brewday went very smoothly, and I’m happy that it’s bubbling vigorously in the carboy this morning.

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Everything looks fine. Maybe use a little more strike water next time.

I would brew 2 or 3 batches before you start changing settings in BeerSmith

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Looks like you had a successful first run.[quote=“golfduke”]I measured my runoff to see what my grain absorption was and am a little surprised- 6.5qt of wort collected. That works out to be .14gal/lb absorption rate, which seems to be high compared with Denny’s suggested .1gal/lb guideline. Is this OK? [/quote]That isn’t necessarily your grain absorption, most mash tuns don’t completely so you’ll have some wort left in there. I would still figure using ~.1-.12/gal until you’re sure. To get an idea of what your dead space is put 2 gallons of water in your mash tun and let it drain, after it stops measure how much water is left.[quote=“golfduke”]I followed beersmith’s volumes for batch sparging and did a 2 step batch sparge with 10min soak time for each[/quote]There’s no need to do 2 sparges, unless you mash tun is small and can’t hold that much water. A rest is unnecessary for the sparge, just stir it up really well and drain.

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Ah, that makes perfect sense about the dead space. I’ll check that tonight.

So re: batch sparging- I have plenty of mash tun space. Basically, just add the two sparge values from beersmith together, dump in, stir vigorously, and then drain as normal? That’ll save me some time for sure.

Thanks again for the advice… just what I was looking for :slight_smile: