First all grain beer

We started of making kit beers which come as a tin of gloop which you mix with water and add yeast then ferment and bottle. We then progressed on to beers made from malt extract and hops, for this you get a similar tin of gloop, but you need to boil it up with hops before proceeding to ferment and bottle. Then more recently we progressed to mini mash beers which are as for the malt extract but some grain is boiled with the mixture to refine the flavour.
We made our first all grain brew the other day. For this you start with malted grain (malting is a process where the grains are sprouted before being dried out) and crack it then heat it up with water to get the wort (which is what we got in the previous methods by diluting the malt extract). This method gives one a lot more control over the flavour of the beer as heating at different temperatures extracts different things from the grain. There is a lot of complex theory and science behind it which we are still learning (and may never learn fully as one has to be VERY spoddy about it and precise with temperature, PH of water, timings etc).

As a further step we can go on and buy unmalted barley and perform the malting and roasting ourselves and even further we could grow our own barley (there are a lot of different varieties and the weather and growing conditions further affects the taste)

As a simple starting place we bought some all grain kits which come with the malt, hops and yeast. This one is an Alt beer.

As I mentioned we first had to crack the grain. We bought a malt mill but we got stressed by the price of the high tech ones and bought a more reasonably priced ones. In the end it did the job although perhaps there was rather too much 'flour' in the mix. Apparently it can be good to end up with pieces of grainin varying sizes rather than everything neatly cracked in to equal size pieces.
It took some 'adjusting' with a hammer and extensive application of WD40 to make it cooporate though

Corona Malt Mill (wouldn't really recommend)

'Adjustments'

Further adjustments

Once it was fettled it didn't take too long to crack all the malt (something like 4.5kg)

We then went outside and heated it with water holding it at various different temperatures for lengths of time specified by the kit instructions. We had to put the malt in a pillowcase, we had a bag bought for the purpose but it turned out to be too small. The process didn't work perfectly as the very fine grains (flour) in the cracked malt clogged the material up so when we removed the pillowcase with the grain in (to leave behind the liquid with all the sugars and flavours boiled out of the grain) it was full of liquid. We ended up having to tip it out in to one of our fermenters with a tap and extract the liquid through the tap which again kept getting clogged. All not quite according to the instructions. We are planning on splashing out for a better brew kettle which will help us with this process of removing the liquid from the grain (called lautering)

Once the grain is removed the liquid is boiled up with the hops for a period of time. You can see the gas burnr and cylindar here. Not sure how much of the gas each brew is going to use up. Quite a bit I suppose as the beer is heated for something like 160 minutes.

It then has to be cooled quickly and tranfered to the fermentation vessel. We filled the bath with cold water and used that for cooling.

In the end the wort was a bit cloudier than we normally get because of our milling and lautering issues, but not too bad. It is busy fermenting away and the proof will be in the drinking.