This past weekend I made my way down to San Jose get another brew day in with Josh. But this wasn’t just any brew day, this was our first attempt at all grain! We’ve been extract brewing for a few years now and we have finally made the jump.

This was a learning brew for sure. We just wanted to go with a nice and easy IPA to get the hang of things. Overall the process went smoothly, but we would do a few things different next time.

I’ve been wanting to use Cashmere hops for a little while now. We went with the following trio:

It’s funny, going all grain makes it a longer process, but with the equipment upgrades, I think we ended up saving some time. Also we ended up saving some money. Now it’s truly cheaper to brew our own beer than buy it.

This was where the unfamiliarity started. We did a 4.1 gallon strike at 175 degrees. After letting the grains soak for an hour, it was sparge time!

This is an area where looking back at, we could have done better. The process went a little too fast. Our grain bed dried out sooner than it should have which left some of those precious sugars behind.

Here was our hop schedule:

1 oz. Galaxy for 60 minutes
1 oz. Cashmere for 30 minutes
1 oz. Motueka for 20 minutes

We did another additional ounce of each hop at the flameout.

Water, grains and hops boiled together means we have some delicious hot wort! One of the best purchases made was the wort chiller. It has sped the process up quite a bit.

With the wort nice and cold, it’s time to check the gravity, get the wort into the fermenter and pitch the yeast.

Now the hard part, we wait. We will give this a good two weeks to ferment and booze up. It’s funny how easy it is to brew beer. I really hope we are able to get an improved color by switching to all grain. Also I think we will get a far better flavor over extract brewing. While we’ve made some good beers over the years, they all have had that homebrew taste to them. I hope we get to eliminate that.

Josh sent me a video of some beautiful bubbling action coming from the beer today. I’ll be sure to keep this updated once we get it kegged. I enjoy the process of all grain brewing a lot more. I believe we have more control over the process and we truly get to build the recipes. I’m excited to get some more brews under our belt. What would you like to see us brew? And let me know if you want a bottle, we are always looking for feedback!