I wanted to put up a post about starting down the path of all-grain brewing.  All-grain brewing gives you ultimate control over the wort.  You can control the exact proportion of base malt to specialty malts and you can control the body of the beer through mash temp.  These two factors are things that are out of your control as an extract brewer.  You can certainly “shop around” and make 3-4 pale ale recipes using base extract from different suppliers.  Maybe you’ll find one that’s just right.  What happens though if you don’t fine one that’s just right?  Well, that’s where all-grain comes in.

Before I continue…
Extract brewing is great in its own right.  You can make awesome beer with extract.  You can win awards with extract.  There are microbreweries out there based upon extract brewing!!!  There is absolutely nothing wrong with using extracts.  However, eventually you may want to see if you can “brew like the pros” or you may hit a wall in recipe tweaking that forces you to investigate the all-grain process.

In this first part of “Going All-Grain” I want to introduced the most important piece of the puzzle for getting there; the mash tun.  Now there are several ways to mash and lauter (rinse) your grains.  The method I employ is referred to as batch-sparging.  I’ll discuss the how and why in a subsequent post.  I want to focus this post on how I built my mash tun to start to give you some ideas.

First off I used a 50qt “cube” cooler that I got on sale one winter at Target.  It had a spot for a valve, but it wasn’t drilled out.  So I was free to do what I wanted.  I chose to keep it real simple and I purchased a second valve that you normally see on your bottling bucket.  I also purchase a rubber stopper that would fit into the port of the valve once inside the cooler.  I jammed a stainless steel T-fitting into the stopper.  To serve as a sieve to strain the wort from the grain I used the ever popular stainless steel hose braid.

Working with the braid can be tricky.  I simply hacked the end fitting off with a saw.  Then I cut it to my approximate length.  Wearing gloves, I carefully worked the rubber hose out of the interior of the braid so I was just left with the braid.

This picture is a close up of the valve on the cooler.

This picture is a close up of the braid clamped to the T-fitting and jammed into the stopper.

Here is what the whole thing looks like assembled inside the cooler.

Now you’ll notice that I doubled over the braid into two loops.  This isn’t really necessary.  In fact most other people you’ll just see one straight 5 inch piece of braid.  I went with the doubled over loop to increase my overall lautering profile with respect to the dimensions of the cooler.  This was to decrease the probability of channeling if I had decided that batch sparging wasn’t for me, or that I wanted to give fly sparging a try. (I will describe the differences in a future post).

Here is a picture of beautiful wort running out of the tun.  This was wort for the Belgian Tripel!

So that’s the basics of what my mash tun look like.  I’ll discuss how I set up my mash in part 2!!

In the mean time here… have a beer on me.

Read on for Going All Grain Part 2!