It is with a bit of sheepishness that I admit to being, up until recently, a partial extract brewer. Partly this is because of how successful you can be brewing with part grain/part dry malt extract, partly it is due to the the additional equipment requirements, but mostly it was due to lack of imagination and motivation. But my brother, the professional brewer, called me a wimp for not going all-grain and extolled the virtues of the added flexibility all-grain brewing provides.
So I finally relented. I have now made the great leap forward to all-grain brewing. I had no doubt that I could do it without much extra effort and I had no doubt that I could do it exceptionally well. Hubris. What I did was a complete botch-up job.
But first a little background. When I begin to consider going all-grain, I of course thought of the cheap converted plastic cooler and was ready to invest the $50 and get going. But alas my wife, erstwhile employee of an environmental organization, starting yammering on about heating up plastic, venting toxins, yada yada yada. [Next she'll be on about the dangers of storing waste from an alumina plant in a big reservoir - yea right, like what could possibly go wrong with that?] Anyway, so the plastic cooler plan was scuttled.
Thus it came to pass that my birthday arrived and my whole family got together and bought me an obscenely fancy - but obscenely cool - mash tun and I was a-ready to brew. [They also bought me a massively outsized but incredibly awesome mash paddle]
The Mash
What better way to begin my life of all-grain brewing, thought I, than to brew the next installment of THE HOPOPOTAMUS - the best beer in the world? So off to Steinbart's I went, collecting The Beerax along the way, to buy an enormous amount of grain. 13.5 pounds to be precise. I also grabbed five, yes five different varieties of hops, one upping the previous Hopopot by adding Columbus hops to the mix.
The Beerax and the Paddle
And we were ready to begin.
