We have finally made our first all grain batch of beer. This picture is the inside of our mash tun which is holding all of the grain and about 4.5 gallons of water. The water is at a specific temperature for about an hour to extract the fermentable sugars from the grain. Differences in temperatures will effect the body of the wort and the overall alcohol potential. Higher temperature mashes will produce beers with a fuller body from increased amounts of unfermanatble sugars. Lower temperature mashes produce more fermentables sugars and an increased alcohol potential; but as a result, the body of the beer will be comparitively less. We brewed a brown ale, and chose a mash temp of 153 F, which is about the middle of the road. Mash temperatures can range from 146 F to 165 F. Low=146-150, mid=150-155, high =156-165. The specific mash temperature is picked based on the type of beer being brewed, but you can do experiement "outside the box" which I am sure we will do in the future. 
After the mash is completed, the wort is run out of the cooler in the boil kettle. Since we want to have a preboil of volume of 6.75 gallons, a sparging step is needed to obtain enough wort. The volume of water that is needed to reach our target volume is heated to about 180 F and then poured into the mash tun on the grains. It is stirred once more and then wort is drained into the boil kettle. Since this was our first attempt, everything did not proceed as smoothy as planned. We had some mashing issues in which all of the wort could not be drained from the mash tun into the boil kettle as efficiently as possible. As a result, a decent amount of wort was left in the mash tun and never made it into the kettle. So instead of having 5 gallons of finished beer, we only ended up with 3.5 gallons. Hopefully we can get a better handle on our system and not have this problem next time.
For our next batch we are going to start experimenting with belgian yeast strains. We are going to make a batch of IPA and split it in half. One half will be fermeneted with a traditional california ale yeast, and on the other half we are going to pitch a beglian strain of yeast to make a belgian IPA. It will be interesting to see how much the overall flavor of the beer is a reslut from the yeast alone.
