After a few batches now, I’m still not where I’d like to be with my brewing process and setup and everything. Things were much simpler when we just had the old Coleman cooler mash tun and used my porch steps to set up an all-gravity system 
Now I have a converted keg system. I also have a pump. I also have a nice plate chiller, a ‘whirligig’-style sparge arm, a grain mill, a temp control for my fridge… a lot has been added, but I haven’t spent much time getting all of these things put together in such a way that they get set up the same way every time and everything ‘just works’. Hell, I have all this stuff and still don’t even have volume markings on my vessels! I’m still eyeballing all of my volume measurements, and I still, to this day, don’t take any gravity readings during my brew day.
The gods have smiled upon me for a long time. I’ve made some good beer. I’ve made more good beer than bad. And even the beer I didn’t like, others did. But I’m getting less happy with “lucking out” on brew day, and I’m starting to take some steps toward a better process.
This most recent brew day went like this:
12:30 - put 8.5 gal water on burner
12:45 - it’d be nice to cut the entire top off of the hlt so I can pour from it. Dunno how to get 4 gallons into the mash cleanly. Gotta transfer using a 1-gallon pitcher I guess
12:50 - windy as hell. Killing the boil times. 20+ minutes, still only ~120.
1:10 - decided to heat strike water to 185F since I’ll lose heat transfering it to the mash
1:33 - struck with 4 gallons. Transfered using 1-gallon pitcher, into the cajun boiler pot, then all 4 gallons at once into the mash. I stirred, and just measured the temperature. I’m hovering near 154F. Target was 152F. Almost as close as I’ve ever come to nailing my strike temp, and it was the process with the most opportunity for error (though the simplest as well - no hoses or pumps were used, so maybe that’s debatable).
2:08 — temps are still just about perfect.
2:40 — forgot to boil sparge water. Just turned the burner back on.
2:48 — with the lid off for the past 8 mins, mash temp only dropped to 148F. Not bad.
3:23 — just put on burner to boil. Not sure what volume I collected. Gravity about 2 mins before I stopped collecting was still around 1.015+
3:45 — wort is now boiling
3:55 — added 1.5oz crystal pellets @ 3.8%AA
4:10 — added 1oz crystal pellets
4:35 — added tsp. irish moss
4:45 — added 1.5oz crystal pellets
4:55 — flame out.
5:08 — all in fermenter. I lost a LOT to the boil. I’m adding a gallon of water to it now.
Ok, so there are some corrections that need making, and I’ve brewed enough batches now that I can see a pattern in where things go haywire, and where I can’t see patterns, I can see other issues
First, there should never be a point at which you have no idea how much fluid is in a vessel, no matter which vessel we’re talking about. Even if it’s the mash tun, you should know that you’ve put in, say, 4 gallons of strike water. You should know that, so far, you’ve added 3 gallons of sparge water by looking at the water level in the HLT, and you should be able to derive the amount in the mash tun at any point during the sparge by looking at the level in the HLT and the kettle. If you have no markings on any of the vessels, doing this becomes difficult.
Second, you should know how much you lose to equipment alone. Today, for the first time, I tested to see how much water I lose to the mash tun, and I learned something really valuable: where you put your spigot matters even if another tube goes all the way to the bottom. Here’s the story:
The Mash Tun Lesson
I have a converted keg with a store-bought false bottom made for converted kegs. The keg holds 15.5 gallons of water, but I don’t need to fill it all the way up to do the test. I put 10 gallons of water in there, and nothing else. I only used that much because I wanted to mark the volumes on the outside of the vessel — not because they’re useful on a mash tun — they aren’t. I did it because my kettle is also a converted keg, so I can be reasonably sure that the measurements are similar (I’ll mark up the kettle separately tomorrow). Anyway, what I wanted to know is “If I put 10 gallons of water in here, how much can I get *out*?” I put the water in, and opened the valve, and let the water run into a 1-gallon pitcher. I did this repeatedly.
When the water level got near the top of the spigot, there was a very noticeable drop-off in pressure from when it was full. Having dealt with my fair share of siphons and various vessels and stuff, I could see what was going to happen, but I was still surprised. My notion had been that, as long as the fluid keeps running, it’ll run all the way to where the bent tubing reaches to, and the placement of the spigot is irrelevant unless you stop the flow at a point below the spigot. This is only half true.
The reality is that the water will keep flowing past the level of the spigot if there is a siphon point below the spigot. It makes absolute crystal-clear sense when you see it, but I hadn’t been picturing it that way in my brain. When I saw the pressure dropping, a light bulb went off, and I went to grab a hose. I stuck it on, bent it upward so the trickle from the spout would fill it with water, and then let it fall downward so the water would flow out, creating a siphon. The pressure increased dramatically, and I got 9.75 gallons out of that vessel.
Why is this important?
Because if I didn’t understand this, and I temporarily stopped the flow out of the mash tun to take a gravity reading toward the end of the flow, turning on that valve again won’t get me much, and I’ll be wondering why I’m 2 gallons short going into my boil! The center of my spigot is right at the 3 gallon mark! Now that I *do* understand this, I can try to avoid this problem, or at least know that I can probably start a siphon again even if I stop the flow when there is less than 3 gallons in the tun. This *will* make a *large* difference.
The Kettle Lesson
The first thing I thought when I was done running off the wort into the kettle was “I have no idea how much that is”. I guesstimated that it was about 6.5 gallons, and after looking at some pics I took during the session, and marking up my mash tun, I think I was pretty close on that guesstimation. The real lesson though had to do with how fluid is lost during and *after* the boil.
For whatever reason, I completely forgot, until I was staring at the bottom of the murky, emptied kettle, that you lose fluid to the kettle itself, over and above evaporation. Some fluid is absorbed by the hops, and plenty is left at the bottom of the kettle because… well… it’s sludge. In the future I’m going to figure in about a half gallon of loss right there.
Also, I lost *a lot* to evaporation. I boiled (I mean, the wort was actually boiling) for 70 minutes. If you consider that I started the boil with ~6.5 gallons of wort, and lost a 1/2 gallon to the bottom of the kettle, and that only roughly 3.5 gallons made it into the fermenter, that would mean that I lost something like 2.5 gallons to evaporation in a 70-minute boil! Of course, this doesn’t mean that I lost 2.5 gallons per hour. In reality, the kettle was on the burner for 90 minutes, and evaporation was taking place for just about the entire time. But even so, it means I was losing at a rate somewhere around 1.5 gallons per hour, and probably better than that during the time that the boil was really rolling.
And the boil was *really* rolling. This is only the 2nd batch with the new burner, and the first batch with it was about a year ago (I had my first child in the interim, so you’ll excuse the lack of brewing activity). The boil was downright violent. Much more rigorous than anything we had with the old burner. Maybe I just shouldn’t be too surprised that I lost so much to the boil.
I’ve learned two things about boiling in general - one I’ve known for a long time, and the other I just learned:
A long time ago I learned that you should *not* put a cover on your boil, because one reason you boil is to get rid of volatiles that can cause off flavors. One that comes to mind is some kind of sulfur compound created by the hops during the boil, but there are others as well. What I only just learned, though, is that there is an actual target to shoot for with evaporation rates, and there is such a thing as over- and under-evaporation, and either situation (in dramatic form, I imagine) can have an impact on your beer. See this.
