BIAB+No-CHILL (My Method)

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My BIAB & NO-CHILL Method

I think after a few BIAB brews under my belt I now have a system that I am happy with. It’s still open for tweaking here and there, and new beer recipes will require the odd change.
This system seems to work for my equipment and style of brewing so I’ll outline my method here as best I can.

Equipment:

1. Buffalo 20 litre manual fill Boiler
2. Home made hop filer fitted to the boiler
3. Campden Tablets
4. Thermometer.
5. Long plastic paddle
6. Home made BIAB voile grain bag
7. Old sleeping bag
8. 10 litre fermentation bucket
9. Protofloc Tablets
10. No-Chill Cube
11. Starsan

Method ( Creating the Sweet Wort ):

1. Fill boiler with 17 litres of water and add a single campden tablet that has been crushed. This is the only water conditioning I am doing at the moment, the campden tablet is used to help remove the chlorine & chloramine from the water. It seems to make a difference in the final taste of the beer, so all may beers will have a campden tablet added.
2. Start heating the water to strike temperature. I have found that 72′c works for me. Strike temperature is the temperature that the water needs to be before the grains are added and is slightly higher than is needed to take into account of the temperature drop when adding a grain bag and the grains.
3. Weight out the grains for the beer and the hops that are required for the brew. I do this as the boiler is heating up to save a little time and to have the grains all ready for the next step.
4. Fit the BIAB grain bag to the boiler and add the grains. The best way to add your grains is to pour or “rain in” the grains slowly into the boiler while stirring, this prevents the grains from sticking together in clumps.
5. Check the temperature of the mash water in the boiler, the temperature should now be around about 66′c – 68′c. If it’s a little hot add a touch of cold water to bring the temperature down. Mash is the term used when soaking malt grains in hot water for an hour or two. During this time the starch in the malt is converted into sugar.
6. Wrap the boiler up in a old sleeping bag and mash the grains for 90 minutes. I give my mash a good stir at the 45 minute point and check the temperature at this point to make sure it’s not cooling down to much.
7. At the end of the 90 minute mash time, check the temperature again just to make sure I haven’t lost to much heat while the grains where steeping. I normally only get a 1′c – 2′c temp drop over the full 90 minute mash time which is fine.
8. I now do a mashout. Mashout is the term for raising the temperature of the mash to 72′c prior to lifting the grain bag out,  so I turn on the heat and bring the temperature up to 72′c while stirring all the time, once the temperature reaches 72′c turn the heat off and leave the mash to steep for 20 minutes. This step and the following step has improved my Brewhouse Efficiency from 75% to around 88% – 90%
9. Lift the grain bag from the boiler and squeeze it to get as much Wort out as possible. Then I hang the bag above a 10 litre fermentation bucket and squeeze all the liquid out again and add this liquid back to the boiler. I average about 2 litres of wort being put back into the boiler this way.
10. Now I FWH (First wort hop) , Make sure the wort temperature is at 72′c and add the hops directly to the boiler. Leave these hops to steep for another 30 minutes. I did this with my last brew and now FWH almost all of my beers. I have found that it produces a nice refined hop aroma, a more smooth & uniform bitterness. I know that it’s the finishing hops that should be used as FWH, but what I have been doing with great results, is taking 50% of the bittering hops used in a recipe and using these as FWH in my brews.
11. Bring the Wort to the boil & once I have a a good rolling boil I add the rest of the bittering hops and boil for a full 90 minutes. This long boil helps drive off any off flavours caused by Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS). Doing this extended boil has been working for me so I’ll continue to boil for 90 minutes however there is a slight down side as the extended boil reduces the final volume of the wort due to extra evaporation, but this can be easily fixed later on in the process .
12. 15 minutes before the end of the boil I add half a Protofloc tablet and when the boil ends I whirlpool the hot wort with my paddle and leave the wort to settle until the wort temperature reaches 80′c, this helps bind the proteins produced during the boil and seem to produce a clearer wort.
13. While the Wort is settling I clean out my No-Chill Cube and give it a good spray with Starsan to kill off any baddies lurking inside.
14. I now add any 20 minute, 10 minute and flame out hops into the No-Chill Cube. This method is highly discussed on many brewing forums  but it has been working well for me at the moment and really like the beers this method produces.
15. Take a SG reading of the wort at this stage, due to evaporation the wort will be a higher SG than expected. I need this reading to dilute the wort to the correct SG at the start of fermentation.
16. Before the wort gets any cooler than 80′c I transfer the hot Wort into my No-Chill Cube on top of the hops, squeeze out as much air out of the No-Chill Cube, seal the Cube up tight and then lay the Cube on each of it’s sides for 10 minutes to aid in killing off any remaining baddies that may be left in the cube.
17. I now leave the cube to cool and the hops in the cube to do their stuff for at least 7 days.

And that is it, the sweet wort (it’s not beer yet) is ready to be fermented when ever I want to. Easy as that.

Equipment: ( Fermentation )

1. Home made BIAB voile grain bag
2. Fermentation Bucket
3. Starsan
4. Thermometer.
5. Air Lock

Method ( Fermentation )

1. Fit the grain bag to the fermentation bucket. This is to catch the hops that have been in the No-Chill Cube and it will also catch some of the hot break material.
2. Starsan the fermentation bucket and the grain bag to kill of the nasties.
3. Using the SG reading I took at the end of the boil, work out the amount of water required to dilute the sweet wort to the correct recipe SG (Current Gravity x Current Volume) / Desired Gravity = Final Volume
4. Boil a kettle and add half the amount of dilution water to the FV and top up with cold water to the correct volume.
5. Pour the sweet wort through the grain bag into the FV. Remove the grain bag, and I squeeze out the hops caught in the bag to collect the maximum amount of sweet wort.
6. Check the temperature of the wort, should be around 26′c.
7. Pitch the yeast and seal up the FV with a air lock in place.
8. Leave to ferment for 7 – 10 days. I find this helps to clear the beer in the FV and compacts the yeast cake ready to bottling.