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Have you tried double crushing? I think you'd get a more thorough crush without making flour.

I think an Ordinary British Bitter is a good starting beer. First of all, they are pretty easy to make. Second, their taste is somewhat of a common ground for homebrewers and those in the BMC crowd.

Another vote for not filtering. "Time clears all beers."

As others have said, the particles you had will probably not be an issue. Until you get a braid or manifold setup, you could use a fine strainer to catch the particles and husks as they exit the mash tun output tube.

I stop adding water to the mash tun when I'm about 1.5 gallons shy of my target pre-boil volume. I don't think I've ever had a tannin issue, and regularly get efficiencies in the low to mid 80's.

Same here. I keep a CO detector, fire extinguisher, and a cordless phone nearby. Take a look at my around 3:58 to see the fan panel I made that fits in my basement walkout door frame. Even in a garage with the door open, I'd suggest opening a window and using a fan to move fresh air in.

I just let the wort fall 2-3 feet from the CFC into my fermenter. This results in very good aeration.

One reason to move to secondary is to allow the flavors to blend without the risk of getting off-flavors from the yeast. This is good practice for bigger beers. Another reason is for clarification. However, the same result can be achieved simply by leaving the beer in primary for 3-4 weeks...

My strike water gets to 165F, and I put in about 1 quart per pound of grain. I do preheat the mash tun with about 1 quart of strike water before mashing; I probably should have explained that in the video. Experience will usually give you an idea of the temperature and amount of strike water...

All items to be sanitized go into my fermenting barrel, sprayed with iodophor+water, and they soak there for about 4-5 mins. Then I rinse the lid and turn it upside down and put it on my brew desk. All sanitized equipment goes on this lid, since it is sanitized. For strike water, I'll draw and...

How about using vacuum? Your target vessel would have a sanitized tube from the fermenter, and a vacuum port. So essentially you'd suck the beer through the tube. Likewise, you can use co2 to push the beer out of the fermenter, but vacuum is free.

Try using a sawz-all. I did this to my manifold: It cut effortlessly through the copper and the joints. This fits in a 5 gallon round igloo.

For most ales, I skip secondary and go for longer primary fermentation. My primary usually goes for about a month. The benefit is lower risk of contamination and lower risk of introducing oxygen during the transfer. Then I simply siphon to a keg.

Glad to hear it. Did you find that once you ran through a session, a lot of your concerns were answered in a bunch of "Oh yeah!" moments? Let us know how the beer turns out.

Nah, I've been using the same coffee can lid for at least 5 years now. In fact, I sometimes play "chase the lid" by trying to steer it around with the water from the sparge tube. I'm on the fence with redistributing the video on anything besides YouTube. On one hand, the idea of selling a DVD...

Bobby: I like your POV style of shooting, so it's like you're right there. Good content as well. No doubt you could ask 100 AG brewers to make a video, and you'll get at least 100 different ways of doing it. For a simpler method, you can just substitute. For example, before I had a pump, I...

Thanks. I've heard it both ways but apparently I picked the least common of the two! -joe

Thanks, everyone, for the feedback. I'm happy to hear that some people are using the information to get past sticking points, or parts of the process that were previously unclear.

After 2 months of preparation, videotaping, editing, and tweaking, my brewing video is finally done. The purpose was to give people an introductory overview of all-grain brewing, and show the mechanics of making beer using my basement brewery. It is by no means a complete thesis on the subject...

At 2 years, I probably over-analyzed the process, but it was a fun experience. All the details are in my slightly outdated blog.