NB's 10 gallon cooler mash tun - What else is recommended

[San_Diego_Matt]

So I got a sweet little dual burner burner setup for Christmas and have a $75 NB Gift Card from last Christmas so I figure there's no time like the present to go to all grain.

I've looked on the NB site and see their 10 gallon mash tun that lets you pick a bunch of options to go with it. It seems to come with the actual cooler, a bronze valve kit, a stainless false bottom and 2 barbs.

In addition to these items you can also upgrade the bronze valve kit to a stainless one, you can upgrade the barbs to stainless, include some tubing and get a DVD to show you how to use their system.

I'm planning on upgrading the valve and the barbs to stainless, but passing on the tubing. I've got plenty of that.

My question is what else do I need? I've brewed extract for the past 8 or so years so the only part I really need to learn is the actual all grain process. I've got Palmer's book so all I really need are equipment recommendations.

Anyone have sparge arm recommendations?

Would love to hear them as well as any other tips on getting started with my new mash tun.

Thanks

Matt

[siwelwerd]

Anyone have sparge arm recommendations?

Batch sparge. http://hbd.org/cascade/dennybrew/

[BDawg]

Batch sparging works great.

I don't use a sparge arm when I'm fly sparging. All I do is put a plate (ie, a dish) on top of my grain bed so the water doesn't dig in.
I used to have a sparge arm and it used to clog up during the initial recirculating (vorlauf). I suppose I could have used a pitcher, at first, but oh well.

[Ozwald]

Did you think about boobs?

Oh sorry, I meant crushing those boobs. Err.. grain. Your avatar was distracting me for a second.

Other than that I can't really think of anything. Besides boobs, of course.

If you don't have the extra scratch laying around, I'd go low tech if you choose to fly sparge. Batch sparging is probably a better way to start, since it's one less thing you have to pay attention to while you're getting the hang of the switch to AG. You can always modify your cooler after a couple batches to go fly. As for arms, I've built a few, I've used a few commercial ones & I would either go low tech with a pitcher & a diverter plate (I used my big steel spoon) or I would go with a Blichmann Auto-Sparge. All the cheaper stuff I tried was complete crap & a waste of money.

One other low tech way that worked really well for me was adding another bulkhead in the cooler lid for the recirc & using one of those plastic wort aerators on the inside. I had to shim it with a small square cut from some high temp tubing, but as long as the liquid level was above 3/4's it worked great. On small batches where the level was low you either had to go to a crawl with your flow rate or it would just spray the walls, run down the sides & kill efficiency by basically channeling between the wall & bed.