Thought I'd make a little post to encourage guys who think all grain brewing is too hard and daunting for them. It's actually really easy and rewarding.
I'm making a larger soon, but the larger yeast I had was a bit old, and I wast too sure how viable it would be, so decided to make a yeast starter which would be a good way to level up!
First I weighed out 450g of malt barley and ground it up.
I measured out 1.5l of water straight out of the kettle into my thermos. It was a little hot so I replaced about 200mm with tap water which got it back to about 70 degrees C. Stired the malt in which dropped the temp to 64.9 and filled the thermos. Screwed the lid on and forgot about it for a couple of hours.
After I drained that out, I batch sparged, which consisted of me filling the thermos with kettle water, waiting 10 minutes and straining the wort out. I ended up with 2.5 litres which I boiled on the stove for 15 minutes then dropped into the 2.6l glass jar fermenter which was pre sterilised while still hot. Next morning I dropped in my rehydrated 11g packet of saflarger s23 yeast. And there you have it. All grain mashing with very basic equipment done in the missus kitchen. Admittedly 2.5L isn't much wort when making whiskey but I thought it was a good demonstration of not needing flash gear to do it. I usually do 30l batches in an esky. It's not hard! So I challenge you all to give it a go some time!
-mad dog.