Afternoon,
I did my first all grain brew using my new equipment and several questions came up during the process so I thought I would just throw them out here and hope for some help from the hive mind.
I was doing a 5 gallon Kölsch recipe and using keggles for mashing and the boil. I got this set from another homebrewer along with a keezer and various other equipment. The setup is 3 keggles and a 2 tier propane burner stand. I used one keggle for mashing, one for heating sparge water, and one for the boil.
1. One general issue I had was "wasted"/"unused" water or wort. Because of where the spigots are I would often have 1 or two gallons of liquid left in the keggle when transferring liquids from keggle to keggle. Is this normal or is there some trick to not leaving behind as much liquid?
2. The false bottom I used in my mashing keggle took 3 gallons of water before the water would rise above the false bottom. Again, is this normal for keggles? Is my false bottom too big? How do I account for this 3 gallons when figuring out recipes?
3. I had very inconsistent temperature readings throughout the process. My keggles have thermometers above the spigots and the reading on them was not consistent with my digital thermometer I used. Heck, depending on where I placed my digital thermometer I would get different temperature. The range was between 2 to 10 degrees F different. Is there some trick to getting a consistent temperature? (The thermometers are new so I fairly certain they are working correctly.)
4. What is the best way to transfer liquid from one keggle to another? I was given a small pump with the equipment and the guy told me it worked fine but I have been unable to get the pump to move water. My 2 tier propane stand kind of works but I often have to tip the keggles on their side to get the liquid moving. (This is the pump
https://www.amazon.com/bayite-BYT-7A015-Circulation-Supply-Adapter/dp/B01G305PK0/ref=pd_nav_hcs_bia_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=N6EETNZAZ3NR4SZ2H8PD 5. For sparging is there a good method or tool for sparging with keggles? Since my pump was not working I just used a pitcher to sparge slowly. I probably did a poor job since I was moving the grain bed around and the rate was not steady.
7. More of a general all grain question, how do you calculate your mash time and sparge time/rate? Along with all grain brewing I am looking to do my own recipe creation and I am still unsure how to figure out those numbers.
6. This may answer the other questions but are keggles too big for me to use? I generally do 5 gallon recipes. Do I need to do much larger recipes to use the keggles correctly? If the keggles are too big what is a solid/cost effective 5 gallon setup? I have all the stuff for mini-mash brewing so I have a lot of equipment.
Thanks for any help anyone can offer!