All-Grain Brew Day — End-to-End Walkthrough

A chronological guide to brewing a batch of all-grain beer, written for someone still getting comfortable with the process. Every step says what to do and why it matters, so you can follow it the first few times and then stop needing it.

Members brew on all sorts of kit, so this is written to work on any of the three common setups rather than assuming one.

Which setup are you on?

The chemistry is identical across all three. What changes is how you separate wort from grain, and how much water you start with. Your efficiency will differ between them too — see Reading Gravity, ABV & Efficiency, because that is the number that decides whether someone else’s recipe hits its OG on your kit.

The three golden rules

1. Sanitation beats everything. Once wort drops below ~80 °C it can no longer protect itself. From that point on, anything that touches the beer must be sanitised. The most common cause of a ruined batch is a slip late in the day when you are tired.
2. Write everything down. Target vs actual gravity, volumes, temperatures, timings, what went wrong. You cannot improve a process you do not measure.
3. Mise en place. Weigh, measure and lay everything out before you start heating water. Brew day moves in real time, and you do not want to be hunting for hops while the boil climbs toward a boil-over.

A full brew day is 4–6 hours plus cleanup. Most mistakes happen in the last hour.

Before your first club brew day

Brewing at someone else’s place, or alongside other members, changes a few things:

• Ask what you need to bring. Usually your own grain, hops, yeast and fermenter. Kettles and burners are generally the host’s
• Agree who is treating the water, and treat the whole day’s volume once rather than per-brewer. This is the most common shared-brew-day mistake
• Bring your own fermenter and anything soft — tubing, bungs, a bottling wand. Stainless and glass can be shared; scratched plastic should not be. If you have ever done a wild or sour beer, none of that gear travels
• Label your fermenter before you arrive. Three identical buckets on one bench is a predictable problem
• Expect it to run long. Two brewers sharing a burner is not twice as fast

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Stage 0 — Prep (night before, or first thing)

Read the recipe and know your numbers. Write your targets down before touching equipment: batch size into the fermenter, OG, FG, IBU, mash temperature and time, and your water volumes.

Work out your water volumes. Total water is roughly:

batch size + grain absorption + boil-off + equipment and trub losses

Starting figures: grain absorbs ~0.8–1.0 L per kg, boil-off is ~3–4 L per hour, and you lose ~2–3 L to trub and deadspace. On an all-in-one or three-vessel setup, split the total into mash water and sparge water. On full-volume BIAB it all goes in at once. Your recipe software gives these figures directly.

Treat the water for chlorine and chloramine. Tap water is usually chlorinated, and both chlorine and chloramine react with malt to produce a plaster and TCP off-flavour at astonishingly low concentrations.

Add campden (metabisulphite) at one crushed tablet per 75 L — half a tablet covers roughly 38 L, about right for a single 23 L batch’s total water. Stir, and it neutralises both within a couple of minutes. Do this to all brewing water, mash and sparge.

Boiling is not a substitute; it does almost nothing to chloramine. More in Brewing Water Basics.

Weigh and crush the grain. Aim for a crush that splits the husk but leaves it largely intact — too fine and the bed compacts into a stuck mash, too coarse and efficiency drops. BIAB is the exception: the bag does the filtering, so you can crush finer and should.

If you are milling smoked or peated malt, run a kilo of base malt through afterwards and tell whoever mills next. Trace guaiacol in someone else’s pale ale reads as medicinal TCP — see Bandaid, TCP & Clove.

Weigh the salts, mash and sparge separately. Weigh each portion into its own labelled cup so you do not dump the lot in one place. Keep acid for mash-pH adjustment to hand.

Weigh and bag the hops by addition. Each charge into its own labelled bag — bittering, each late addition, whirlpool — with the time written on it. During the boil you then just grab the next bag.

Pre-brew checklist:

• Recipe open, targets written down
• Mash and sparge water volumes calculated
• Campden in all water, at one tablet per 75 L
• Grain crushed and weighed
• Mash and sparge salts weighed into separate cups; acid to hand
• Hops weighed, bagged and labelled by addition
• Whirlfloc and yeast nutrient set aside
• Yeast located, and out of the fridge to warm if pitching dry
• Chiller, tubing, taps, paddle, hydrometer all clean
• Fermenter, lid and airlock ready to clean and sanitise
• StarSan and cleaners on hand
• Spray bottle of water near the kettle for boil-over control

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Stage 1 — Setup and water

1. Fill your mash vessel with mash water and your sparge vessel with sparge water. On full-volume BIAB, everything goes into the kettle
2. Add the mash salts and any acid to the mash water, and the sparge salts to the sparge water. Stir to dissolve
3. Start heating toward strike temperature, with the sparge water warming in parallel

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Stage 2 — Strike and mash in

Strike temperature. On a full-volume system, heat the water to your target mash temperature — most ales sit at 65–67 °C, where lower is drier and higher gives more body. Cool grain pulls the temperature down a degree or two, so many brewers strike 1–2 °C high and let it settle.

On a three-vessel setup with a separate insulated mash tun, strike water goes in hotter — typically 8–10 °C above target — because the tun and the grain both absorb heat. Learn your own tun’s behaviour and write the number down.

Mash in.

• Stir the grain in steadily, in stages rather than all at once
• Break up dough balls. Pockets of dry flour never convert and drag efficiency down. Dig the paddle to the bottom and fold
• Do not recirculate too fast if your system recirculates. A hard pull compacts the bed onto the false bottom and gives you a stuck mash. A slow, steady trickle is all you want

Check and record mash pH. About five minutes in, once mixed and settled, measure with a meter or strips. Target 5.2–5.4. If high, add acid a little at a time and re-check. Record the number — corrections after the 30-minute mark do very little.

Mash. Lid on, hold temperature for the mash time, typically 60 minutes. On an insulated tun you are relying on the insulation; check once mid-mash and apply heat only if it has drifted more than a degree or so.

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Stage 3 — Mash out and sparge

Mash out. Raise the mash to ~75–78 °C and hold 10 minutes. This stops enzyme activity, locking in your fermentability, and thins the wort so it runs off more freely. On an insulated tun with no heat source, this is done by adding boiling water or is simply skipped — it is a nice-to-have, not a requirement.

Sparge — rinsing the sugars out.

All-in-one: lift the grain basket to the halfway point and let it drain, then pour ~75 °C sparge water slowly and evenly over the top so it percolates rather than channels. A jug, a sparge arm or a colander to diffuse the pour all help. Lift the basket clear once the water is mostly through and let it drain fully.

Three-vessel: either batch sparge — drain the tun, add a portion of sparge water, stir, rest a few minutes, drain again, repeat — or fly sparge, running water onto the bed at the same rate you draw off, keeping an inch of liquid above the grain. Batch sparging is simpler and gives up very little.

BIAB: usually nothing to do. Lift the bag, let it drain, and resist wringing it out — that squeezes tannin and husk material through. If you want a little more extraction, dunk the bag in a bucket of ~75 °C water for a few minutes first.

Do not disturb the grain bed on any setup that has one. The settled bed is itself a filter, and stirring pulls haze and tannin into the wort. Only stir as a last resort if flow has genuinely stuck.

Take a pre-boil gravity reading. Pull a small sample, cool it, read it. Compare against your recipe’s pre-boil target — this is your first honest read on mash efficiency, and it is the last point where you can still do something about it.

Start the ramp to boil once you have enough wort through, so you are not waiting around. Bring the sparge water up near boiling as it finishes, so the kettle holds a rolling boil rather than stalling each time cooler water arrives.

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Stage 4 — The boil

Clear the grain out. Lift the basket or bag into a clean bucket to catch drips. You can add the last ~500 mL of runnings to the kettle, but only if at least 45 minutes of boil remain, so the late, more tannic runnings are boiled and diluted out.

Watch for the hot break. As the wort approaches boiling, proteins coagulate and a thick foam rises fast. This is the classic boil-over moment:

• Break the surface foam with the paddle, and
• Spritz a hole in it with a water spray bottle. Knocking the foam down releases the trapped steam and stops a wave of boiling wort going over the side

Once the break settles it boils calmly.

Boil uncovered, and boil hard. Sixty minutes is the common default, but the number depends on your grist:

On a pilsner-malt beer, boil 90 minutes. Pilsner malt carries far more SMM — the precursor that heat converts into DMS, the cooked-corn and creamed-sweetcorn fault — than standard pale malt does. A vigorous rolling boil with the lid off and the steam genuinely escaping is what drives it out. A lid partly on, or anything that lets vapour condense and run back in, puts the DMS straight back in the wort.

There is no fermentation fix for DMS. It is a boil problem, and once it is in the beer you are stuck with it. Prevention is the only option, which makes this one of the few places worth being dogmatic about.

Add hops on schedule. Bittering at the start for IBU; flavour and late additions in the back half.

At 10 minutes left:

• Whirlfloc, to help proteins clump and drop out
• Yeast nutrient, about 5 g for a 23 L batch
• Drop the chiller in, so the last 10 minutes of boil sanitises it

Sanitise your transfer paths. Before the boil ends, run boiling wort through every route the wort will later take — the recirculation arm and the lower tap — so whichever you use at transfer is already clean. Re-route carefully; boiling wort burns.

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Stage 5 — Whirlpool and chill

At flame-out:

1. Heat off, target 75–80 °C for the whirlpool
2. Chill only until the wort reads about 85 °C, then stop. Residual heat coasts it down into the 75–80 °C window without overshooting
3. Add whirlpool hops at ~80 °C. Below boiling they give aroma and flavour without scrubbing it off as steam; below ~80 °C you avoid harsh extraction. Hold 20–40 minutes
4. Recirculate or stir during the stand to keep hops in contact and spin trub into a cone

More on this in Dry Hopping & Whirlpool.

Take your post-boil gravity reading while you wait, cooling the sample first. With your final volume, this gives you brewhouse efficiency. Record both.

Prepare the fermenter while the whirlpool holds:

• Clean first: cold rinse → brewery soap → sodium percarbonate wash to strip organic film → rinse
• Then sanitise with StarSan. A clean surface is a prerequisite — sanitiser does not work on a dirty one

Resume chilling to pitch temperature, usually 18–20 °C for ales — and chill briskly. A wort that sits for a long time in the 60–80 °C band on its way down keeps converting SMM into DMS with no boil running to drive it off, so slow chilling can undo a good 90-minute boil. Get it through that band and down to pitch temperature without dawdling.

There is a real tension here with the whirlpool, which deliberately holds the wort at 75–80 °C for 20–40 minutes — hop aroma against DMS. On a pale, pilsner-heavy beer keep the stand at the shorter end; on a hop-forward beer built on a pale-ale base the DMS risk is much lower and the stand can run long.

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Stage 6 — Transfer and pitch

Transfer the cooled wort through whichever path you sanitised in Stage 4.

Get oxygen into it on the way in. This is the one step in the whole process where you want oxygen, and it matters more than most people realise.

If you only put effort into one off-flavour control, make it this one. Yeast needs dissolved oxygen to build the sterols and unsaturated fatty acids that make healthy cell membranes. Under-oxygenated wort gives you stressed yeast, and stressed yeast is where fusel alcohols, excess esters, a long lag phase and incomplete attenuation all come from — plus a longer window in which diacetyl precursor accumulates. Nearly every “hot”, “solventy” or “harsh” young beer traces back here.

Let the wort splash and tumble as it fills, from a height, so it picks up air. For a fresh dry pitch that is genuinely enough — dry yeast is propagated aerobically and comes packed with those reserves already, which is why the manufacturers say it does not need oxygenating.

Everything else needs more than splashing: a harvested slurry has spent its reserves, liquid yeast was never packed with them, and wort above ~1.065 puts the yeast under osmotic stress on top. In those cases aerate deliberately — a sanitised aquarium stone and pump, an oxygenation wand, or failing that a solid few minutes of vigorous stirring or shaking. See Yeast Handling.

Record actual OG and actual volume into the fermenter. This is your real starting point.

Pitch the yeast. Sanitise the scissors and the outside of the packet, open carefully, and tip the dry yeast evenly over the surface. Do not stir it in and do not submerge the sachet.

Seal up. Sanitised lid, airlock with sanitiser in it, and move the fermenter somewhere as close to target temperature as you can manage.

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Stage 7 — Fermentation

Temperature schedule. The first day is when most off-flavours are produced, so start cool and ramp up:

• First 24 hours: 16–18 °C — keeps the vigorous early phase clean
• Main growth: 18–20 °C
• Cleanup: ~20 °C

Monitor it. Fermentation is done when gravity is stable across 2–3 consecutive days, not when the airlock stops bubbling, which is an unreliable signal at best.

The diacetyl rest. Near the end of active fermentation, let the temperature free-rise to ~20–21 °C and hold a couple of days.

Worth understanding rather than following blindly. The warmth is doing two jobs: it speeds up the slow chemical step that turns the precursor into diacetyl in the first place, and it keeps the yeast healthy and in suspension so it can then clear it. Miss either and the rest fails — which is why cooling to “protect” a beer is exactly backwards, and why a rest measured in calendar days is meaningless. Diacetyl — the rest, the test, and hop creep covers the twenty-minute test that actually answers it.

Dry hopping, if the recipe calls for it. Add as active fermentation winds down or just after. Keep oxygen pickup minimal when you open up, and dry hop at fermentation temperature, not cold.

Note that dry hops restart the clock. They carry enzymes that break down dextrins, which restarts fermentation and with it the diacetyl cycle. If you dry hopped, your stability countdown runs from the dry hop, not from the end of primary.

Cold crash before packaging. Once fermentation is genuinely complete and any dry-hop contact is up, drop to 1–4 °C for 24–48 hours to clear yeast and hop debris.

Crashing is a one-way door — it removes the yeast that cleans up after the beer. Before you commit: gravity genuinely level (not merely slowing), and, if this beer matters, a forced diacetyl test that comes back clean.

Step down rather than shocking it. If your temperature control allows, drop in stages — say 20 °C → 12 °C → 4 °C over a couple of days — rather than slamming straight to 1 °C. It helps twice over:

• Biologically, a sudden cold shock can halt the yeast’s flocculation machinery partway, so the cells never settle properly and you get a stubborn yeast haze that no amount of extra time fixes
• Physically, haze particles given time form larger, denser aggregates that settle out. Crashed too fast, proteins and polyphenols bind into loose micro-gels that are very hard to drop or filter

Do not leave the beer sitting on the yeast cake for weeks after FG. Once fermentation is finished and the cleanup is done, the yeast has nothing left to contribute and slowly starts breaking down, giving meaty or savoury autolysis notes and hurting head retention. Days are fine at homebrew scale; a month is asking for it.

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Stage 8 — Packaging

Sanitise everything, again. Every surface that touches finished beer.

You have two routes. Kegging is covered in Kegging, Carbonation & Competition Bottles, including how to fill entry bottles off a keg. Bottling is below.

Bottle prep. Bottles must be clean before they are sanitised. The habit that makes this easy is rinsing every bottle the moment you finish drinking from it, so dregs never dry inside. For stubborn residue, a sodium percarbonate soak. A genuinely clean bottle needs only StarSan before filling.

Priming sugar. Bottle conditioning carbonates by feeding the remaining yeast a measured dose of sugar in the sealed bottle. The simple repeatable method is carbonation drops: 2 per 750 mL bottle, 1 per ~330 mL. Bulk priming — dissolving a calculated dextrose dose into the whole batch — is the next step up once you are comfortable.

Safety, and this one is not optional. Priming calculations assume no further fermentation. If a dry hop has restarted things, or a diastatic saison or Belgian yeast is still working, the extra CO₂ arrives on top of your priming sugar and glass has a hard limit. Before bottling a heavily dry-hopped beer, confirm gravity has been stable for several days after the dry hop, not after primary.

Bottling run. Set up with a sanitised bottling wand. If you cold-crashed, draw from above the sediment. Priming sugar into each bottle, fill with the wand — it fills from the bottom and displaces air, minimising both oxygen and foaming — leave the correct headspace, and cap.

Condition at around 20 °C for ~2 weeks, then move somewhere cool. Chill before drinking.

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Cleanup

Clean while things are still wet; dried trub is far harder to shift.

1. Tip out spent grain and trub, rinse the vessel and all parts
2. Wash with brewery soap
3. Run a sodium percarbonate cycle through the kettle, pump, arm and tubing
4. Rinse, then a final StarSan rinse — the acid helps passivate stainless
5. Dry thoroughly before storing

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Sanitation and chemicals — quick reference

The 80 °C rule: anything contacting the beer below ~80 °C must be sanitised first. Clean then sanitise. Full detail in Cleaning & Sanitation.

Numbers at a glance (typical ale, ~23 L)

Starting points for a standard ale. Always defer to your recipe and your yeast strain — every strain page under yeast lists its own temperature band and attenuation range.