I started with a recipe from Michael Dawson's excellent book Mashmaker (signed copy not required, but highly recommended...it doesn't cost any more!) for a Ryed Irish Stout. It's a classic dry Irish Stout with the flaked barley replaced with flaked rye. The resulting brew day is pretty amazing on the aromatic front.
The changes I made included actually measuring my volumes (nice), and aiming for 60% efficiency on a smaller (5.5 gallons vs. 6 gallons into the fermentor) batch, as well as a number of other extract-centered tricks I had up my sleeve.
The good news is that I totally hit my numbers. The bad news is that it required using a famously-high-extract malt, a 90-minute mash with a mash out step, and a partial sparge step wherein I moved the back to another kettle with a colander inside. I also had to bring the mash back up to temp at about 40 minutes.
While I would be happy with the 62.4% efficiency I measured on this brew day, the whole point of BIAB simplicity is defeated when you have to have a second vessel for sparging and spend significant portions of the brew day raising the temp and stirring constantly to avoid melting the bag. I'm definitely switching back to a cooler MLT. In my last cooler MLT setup, I routinely hit 70% batch sparging and never lost more than 5 degrees over an hour (and that outside in winter). Raising the temp is as easy as adding boiling water or pulling a decoction (which, really, is easy on a homebrew scale). As a bonus, I never had to pull the entire dripping, 170 degree grain bill out of a kettle and cover my arms in near-boiling wort.
I am looking forward to this beer, though.
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