Made my first all-grain beer today and damn it was fun! I don’t why I waited this long to try it.
Everything went pretty smoothly despite using the dennybrew batch-sparge method… I’m kidding denny! In all seriousness thanks for the website, I couldn’t have done it so smoothly without it, I even hit my target gravity right on the nose.
I was commisioned by my friends to make a Sierra clone for their wedding since its their favorite beer so I’m thinking about taking the recipe, designing a really nice layout and having it printed, framed and matted to go along with the 2 special 1-Liter bottles with labels to match. This part is a surprise and I hope they love it as much as i did making it.
Thanks to everyone on this forum for all of the great info!
Congrats, welcome to the obsession. I did a couple of batches for a friend’s wedding, and filled a few bombers of each brew. On their first anniversary I presented them the bottles of their wedding day brew as a surprise.
I haven’t brewed since March ( busy summer, people dying, etc. ) so this weekend is going to feel like my first time doing all grain even though I’ve done several.
I popped open a bottle of this beer today and it is without a doubt the best beer I have ever made. The flavor and bitterness is about as perfect as I could have hoped for and I’m extremely happy with it. If there is one thing that I could improve about it, it would be the mouthfeel. It seems a tad thin/watery to me but I think that’s because I missed my target mash temp and not because of the recipe. I totally forgot to pre-heat the mash tun (70qt extreme cooler) so my strike water wasn’t as hot as it should’ve been. but seriously, i’m trying to find something wrong with it.
I designed a label for them (which is going to be a surprise) and thought you guys might like to see it:
(this site is bad at posting full-sized images so click the image if you want to see a larger version offsite)
I’d just like to thank denny one more time, on brew day I was carrying around a printout of his site and referred to it constantly. It really made my first all-grain go as smooth as possible. Thanks denny!
BTW Euge, I used the fermentation chamber that I built based off of your design for the first time and it worked great! I filled two plastic 1 gal milk jugs, one half-gal and four 12 oz water bottles and threw them all in the freezer the night before brew day. I swapped out the different sized jugs to control the temp and got pretty good at choosing which size would bring the temp into the right range. It kept the temp within a few degrees surprisingly well!
My beer got rave reviews at the wedding and seeing the bride and groom going back to the cooler continuously all day for “their beer” made it all worthwhile. What a great day!
