I recently (about two weeks ago) brewed my first all grain, original recipe. It is a Porter and I'm calling it my Pacific Northwest Porter, because it reminds me of Seattle. I used some pale malt, roasted barley, and chocolate malt. It smelled like heaven while I was mashing and boiling and I tasted some after fermentation before bottling it yesterday. I have to say it was quite delicious. Tasted like a true Porter and better than most the beers I have made thus far. I honestly think it's because I didn't use any extract in my recipe. For those of you who do not know the difference between an all-grain beer and an extract beer it is pretty simple.
All-grain: all of the wort is extracted from combining hot water with a specific amount of grains and mashing them together to break down and extract the sugar from the grains (bags of grain, below).
Extract: You buy malt extract which is either in a powder or syrup form and you add it to water to create your wort. (can of malt extract)
The trade-off between brewing all-grain versus extract beers for homebrewers is that all-grain is harder to do. Basically, extract you just combine things in a big pot. All-grain you have to mash the grains with water at a certain temperature for a while and then you can go onto boiling and other things.
Below are some pictures and descriptions of whats I did.
Picture 1: I had to drill a bunch of holes in the bottom of a fermenting bucket to create a false bottom to basically strain the used grains out from the wort after mashing. This bucket goes inside another bucket and you have a make shift lauter-tun.
Picture 2: This is just water boiling up to about 175 F. I add this to the grains inside my "lauter-tun" and then with the amount of grain I had it dropped the temperature around where I wanted it so it could efficiently extract the sugars.
Picture 3: Starting to add the grains to the lauter-tun because the water was close to the temperature we wanted.
Picture 4: Me mashing the grains inside the lauter-tun keeping an eye on the temperature
Picture 5: John (old roommate and also a homebrewer) came over and helped with the mashing of the grains. It is hard work especially when you are standing over hot water, so we took turns mashing the grain back and forth
Picture 6: The finished product from the mash. 2.5 gallons of wort!
Last but not least, here is a somewhat comical video of me talking about making my beer while mashing.
...and for some reason it cut off about 10 seconds at the end but it's not that important.
