All grain brewing

[cerevisia]

Recently I just started brewing all grain beers, and was wondering, how much grain do you normally use? I've so far brewed two all grains (a bitter and a Vienna lager) and for both I used 4kg's of malt. Is that enough? For my Vienna lager the OG was 1.033, which I'm told is a bit on the light side. The colour was also quite light too. Just wondering if I need to use more malt next time? :/

[cerevisia]

They both made 23 litres btw. 

[Christian]

It really depends on the style, your efficiency and intended OG / FG etc. Use recipe software to calculate all this. Here's a free online one to get you started:

 

http://beercalculus.hopville.com/

[mattd2]

Effeciency (how much sugar you are actually extracting from the wort - as a % of total "sugar" in the grain) is the biggest factor I think (apart from accuarately measuring volumes, etc.).

A quick hand calc you would be at 63% brewhouse efficiency - (33 points x 6 gallons) / (8.8 pounds x 36 points per pound).

Not to bad, key thing is to get your efficiency sorted and then you can estimate the amount of grain need to get "x" amount of "1.0xx" wort

For a comparison, I just did a Irish red and got 20 litres of 1.049 wort from 4.84 kg of grain

[Nathan Murrell]

I did my first AG about 6 weeks ago and used a recipe from one of the guys Adrian Tayler on here and plugged it into Brewmate software which I personally found easier to use than the others. Adrian suggested leaving the estimated efficiency at 60% since it was my first brew, so I used about 6kg grain for a 23L brew.

 

Everything went smoothly and I my efficiency was greater than I thought, so was able to dilute my wort and ended up with about 25L in the fermenter.

 

From what I know now and backing up lots of others comments....it's about learning how your rig works i.e. your efficiency, evaporation in the boil and a few other factors. So hopefully next time I can get away with using less grain.

 

I managed to tweak a few figures in Brewmate for my next one to suit my higher evaporation, so looking forward to number 2. Now just to find a good recipe.....

 

(Oh...and thanks to Adrian for all the help! The guys here are great with help, tips and advice)