New, soon to be brewer - basic questions

I keg 90% of my beer and I still rack to the bottling bucket 80% of the time.  It gives it 1 more chance to settle out particulates.

+1 to the bottling bucket.  I put my bottling sugar in the bucket first.  Then I rack into it, let it create a whirlpool to allow the bottling sugar to evenly mix throughout the beer.  It's still important though, to not let it splash during this racking process.  You don't want to introduce oxygen into your beer before bottling.  If you do, you stand a good chance of having off flavors, especially cardboardy flavors.

Rack = Syphen, by the way.

I had always fly sparged (and really slow too), wanting to squeeze every last drop of sugar out of the grain, but this last brew I did my first batch sparge and save darn near an hour and 15 minutes.  I'm hooked.  That's a pretty significant time savings which has begun to matter to me more as my Brew Buddy has a young child and has not been able to be over for as long.  Never underestimate the value of a brew buddy (especially since I don't have a pump yet and lifting up 6 gallons of wort in a heavy kettle to gravity feed through my chiller is impossible for one guy).

This leads to another issue...If you are going to do 10 gallon batches with a single boil, you'll about have to have a pump to move the wort, unless you are a body builder

Not to beat a dead horse from the above also - but I use a 10 Igloo cooler for my mash tun and with high gravity brews, my mash tun is well over half full, sometimes only leaving me with 5-6" of head space....just a thought.

Mtnmangh said:

Not to beat a dead horse from the above also - but I use a 10 Igloo cooler for my mash tun and with high gravity brews, my mash tun is well over half full, sometimes only leaving me with 5-6" of head space....just a thought.

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I started with  the standard 5 gal Igloo for my mash tun.  Soon I was brewing Scotch ales and heavier beers.  Had to buy a 7.5 gal cooler.  Then I moved up to shooting for 10% beers.  The 7.5 gal doesn't fit 21 lbs of grain.  Now I have a 10 gal cooler.

If you can swing it, get the 10 gal cooler for the mash, 5 gal for the HLT.  If you are doing 5gal batches, the 5 gal MLT is enough.

Thanks everyone.  So I finished reading How to Brew and purchased Papazian's book and I'm about halfway through it.  The more I read about this and the more I think about costs, I am wondering if brewing 5 gallon batches may be the way to go for me anyway.  Here's what i am now thinking though.  If I decide to go with a 70 qt rectangular cooler to use as the mash tun, instead of a 10 gallon round cooler, this would give me more space available to brew 10 gallon batches of any gravity of beer, correct?  Or, if I want, I can just go with my original design of two 10 gallon coolers, one for mash tun, one for HLT and with that setup, I could brew 10 gallon batches of lower gravity beers, and if I wanted to brew a higher gravity beer, I could use my 10 gallon coolers to brew a 5 gallon batch of higher gravity.  Yes, I wouldn't be able to brew a 10 gallon batch of higher gravity, but would at least have the ability to brew 5 gallons of it. 

I'm also thinking I am going to need to get a bottling bucket, bottle capper, and other supplies to get me started.  Would it make sense to just buy a beginner starter kit that includes the basics for extract brewing since I'll need that stuff anyway?  Then, if I get a carboy, I'll have two fermentors for the future and can maybe even try fermenting the same wort in two different fermentors with two different yeasts. 

Remember, if you do more than 5gal batches you will need a pumping system.  Unless you're Heman, 10gal of wort is too heavy to lift safely.

I put my system together over 6 months.  Cost was an issue for me.  I assembled it using mostly used gear.  In retrospect, I would have joined a couple local clubs first and got to know other brewers and visited brew days.  Learning the craft and getting equipment would have been easier.  For new gear, I shopped sales at every local and online brew shop.  I often shopped at advertisers on The Brewing Network since I love the shows and they often have a discount code.  It takes a while but I was ready to brew in the fall when was a good time to ferment since I lacked fermentation temp control back then.

Speaking of that, I should have, and highly recommend, planning fermentation temperature control first.  The two most important parts of brewing are sanitation and fermentation temperature control.  Oddly, no one mentioned that to me.  Now I am a bit zealous about fermentation temperature control with new and not so new brewers. Zealous really means annoying about it.

I started with gear to brew 10 gallon batches at the advice of a friend who got me interested in brewing.  I used a 48QT rectangular cooler using a manifold I made from the design in How  to Brew.  I had 2 converted kegs for HLT and Kettle.  I collected a few glass 6g carboys.  I kegged right off the bat so,a used fridge, temp controller and some kegs.

I only made 5 gallon batches.  I did an all grain 10.5% Imperial Stout and a couple 9.5% DIPAs.  So, big beers can be done in 5G batches.

I have since scaled down to lighter 8g kettles and HLT using the same cooler mash tun for the last 6 years.