I decided to load up my gear and drive over to my son's house to brew a couple of batches this past Saturday to help teach how easy if is to bo all grain (my son's roomate is an extract brewer).
We first brewed 5-gallons of an IPA, which was un-eventful -- no doubt because I was doing the brewing and showing them what to do.
Then we brewed 5-gallons of an Oatmeal Stout, and I let them do most of it with my supervision -- but I didn't supervise close enough.
The problem is that I have a _LONG_ bazooka -- 10' of stainless steel mesh -- which is coiled in the bottom of the tun. It is loosely fastened to the drainage hose by merely being pressed together, and without any sort of a hose clamp. With perhaps as many as a hundred batches or more under my belt, I have _never_ pulled the bazooka loose. But I failed, perhaps due to the number of beers we consumed, to caution them about stirring between batch sparges -- that they need to be careful to not disturb the mesh hose. Well, you can guess what happened: I wasn't paying close attention while they stirred the mash, and the first thing that happened is that they managed to make a couple of loops of the SS Mesh rise to the surface; this meant that a portion of the 'filter' did not have any grain-bed to help filter the finer particles. We 'vorlaufed', but I don't think it was as successful as usual.
Next, on the second batch sparge, the SS mesh was pulled loose from the plastic tube; this had NEVER happened before. While this could have been prevented with the use of a clamp, fixing it was easier than I expected. We tilted the tun about 30 degrees or so, and I used a spoon to dig through the grain bed to expose the drain and the end of the SS tube and reconnected them, and then repositioned the tun and did the vorlauf all over again. Didn't seem to be any problems, but I'm anxious to see how this batch turns out. I have no regrets in not using a clamp; first, a clamp would take even more time, but more importantly, I would not be able to just yank the hose out of the ice chest before dumping the grain.
Cheers.
Bill Velek -- portal to my "HOMEBREWING" sites: