Water Preparation and Grain Crushing

We store our bulk grain in these inexpensive plastic containers. These keep the grain dry and reasonably fresh. We have about 12 of these containers and they are very handy for storing all the P&S Brewery equipment when not in use. You can buy these at WallyWorld on sale for about $6US usually and you can't have too many as far as I am concerned. I keep kegging stuff in one, specialty grains in another, brewing equipment (iodine, tubing, etc) in another, and so on. Then I only need to retrieve the ones I need come brew day.

Crushing away with our Malt Mill. We have an electric drill attached to ease the job of grinding approximately 20 pounds of grain for our 10 gallon batches. It usually takes us about 20 minutes to crush all this grain. We also start our strike water heating up before we start crushing in order to speed things along. We will want this water to end up at about 170-180°F for our single infusion mash. This is a fixed gap mill made by JSP, and I love the thing. I tried all three of the big mills before purchasing this one. If you are going to be doing all grain brewing it is a necessary expense. You can get by with some other type or brand of mill, but you will need to get your own mill eventually. My advice is not to be cheap here, it's a workhorse and you'll be glad you bought a quality mill after a few batches. I started with a corona mill and thought it worked fine, until I did my first batch through this mill, What a difference.

Now this is a good crush. Notice the grains are cracked and not really ground. The pulp is "cracked" into small pieces with a minimum of flour. You want the husks to remain fairly large pieces to enable good filtering of the grain bed while sparging later on. This is a very important part of the all grain brewing. A good crush will result in much better efficiency and better extraction of the sugars from the grains. A corona/flour mill will give you a lot more flour which can lead to a stuck sparge, but they can be used in a pinch. Hey, it's better than using a rolling pin or a large can. Been there, done that...once! Never again.