A community dedicated to homebrewing beer, mead, wine, cider and everything in between. If it ferments, bring it over here.
Share recipes, ideas, ask for feedback or just advice.
Some starting points for beginners:
Quick and diry guide to fermenting fruit - cider and wine
Based on this https://www.morebeer.com/products/chocolate-hazelnut-porter-jamil-zainasheff-grain-kit.html but scaled down to 3 gallons. Came closer to 2 tho. Lost more than expected to boil, I guess.
You should be able to get a bit more volume if you transfer using the pump instead of the spigot. Not a whole lot but makes a difference on the lower volume brews. You can even tilt it a bit toward the pump inlet to get the last little bit out.
I did end up dumping the whole kettle thru a funnel. Didn't want the hop debris but oh well. I'll rack to 2ndary and it'll be fine.
Yeah, I use a hop spider and whirlfloc with the whirlpool arm to limit the solids transferred and it works quite well.
I never got to all in one brew systems, I had to try to deal with one and successfully made some beer.
Main issue for me was the inconsistent results but it may be my hands.
For boil off there are usually power settings so sometimes the larger loss is caused by forgetting to re-select the lower one.
Yeah, I think I had the power too high. It's a new-to-me system and is stronger than my previous (heat stick and a big pot). Lesson learned.
One of the first few brews on the system I was helping to get started (and teach about brewing new guy) ended with boil off of about 1/4 of the volume. We then discovered that it had lower settings - 2000 wats was too much.