It has been just a couple of short months now since I finally took the leap from brewing with DME to all grains all the time. I had enlisted the help of my father in law to build a mash-tun out of a 10 gallon rubbermaid cooler and was aching to put it to use. Add to that a 50 lb bag of 2 row sitting in my pantry taunting me and it was clearly time to get to work. I have always been one to do things the hard way first, and this time was no exception. The difference was this time I wasn't fully prepared for how hard I was about to make it on myself. The challenge that was before me was that I had not procured a grain mill and set aside to crack 8 lbs of grain by hand and whatever means I could.
When I started it already didn't seem like the smartest idea but I convinced myself that it couldn't take more than a couple of hours. Oh I was so young and naive. I had what I thought were a couple of good ideas going in. I was first going to load up a ziploc bag with grains, wrap it in a dish towel to keep to dust from getting too crazy and then tried to roll it with a rolling pin. I might as well have been rolling over a bag full of water, it was pointless and comical. That only lasted about 5 minutes before realizing that was a horrible idea.
Next I moved on to pouring a thin layer of grains into a shallow cookie sheet and again tried to crush the grains with a rolling pin. That worked a little bit better, a very very little bit better. This way I could actually crush some of the grains but again the grains moved very freely about in the tray and only a small amount actually ended up getting cracked at all.
The next plan doubled as the most effective and also a complete mess. My smarter half suggested that I could place one cookie sheet inside of the larger one I was already using and crack the grains between the two sheets. I went after this method first using the rolling pin just applying even pressure until I heard cracking, then using a rubber mallet to hit the top cookie sheet and crack the grain between the two again. The mallet worked somewhat faster but had the downside of spilling more grain out the side than any of the other options by far.
After about 4 hours of work I had finally cracked enough grain to start mashing in, it is then I realized the next challenge ahead of me was prepping water to mash in. As an extract brewer I had never worried about this, warming up the water and dissolving the DME was just part of the process. But sitting there tired from hours of work I realized that this time I had to not only heat almost 8 gallons of water to a much more precise temperature (158F was my goal here) but that this was going to take a lot longer than planned. At this moment I was glad I started brewing just after 4 AM,
Finally grains were cracked, strike water heated I put my new mash tun to work for about 70 minutes (batch sparge). The water looked clearer than I recall out of similar all grain batches but at this point I was well passed to point of no return and off I went into the boil.
An hour later I ended up with about 4.25 gallons of wort ready to be cooled and yeastified. (I know its not a word but how awesome is it). Two weeks later, bottled (though with too much priming honey because I'm an idiot and didn't adjust for the smaller volume) and then into the beer aging/conditioning haven that is my coat closet. Another two weeks then its time to try my creation, the end result is a smile on my face.
During fermentation and conditioning I had applied some lessons learned and convinced the smart one in the family to let me buy a grinder (though I still crank it by hand and I like it that way) and had duplicated the initial batch. A northwestern hopped Florida wild flower honey ale (I'm still pissed that the prez copied me) and had sent batch number 2 into the primary which much more ease and must better results initially. So the smile, was all because I had made good beer, despite all of the issues I had managed good beer once again. It wasn't quite as strong as I hoped, and the color wasn't 100% right, and the carbonation was a disaster even though I have yet to lose a single bottle. But it was tasty, and after I let it calm down very drinkable. I learned a lot that first batch, and learned more my second. Every batch is an adventure kids, so don't worry, relax, and have a homebrew.
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