# Maximum Grain Weight For 23l Batch



## arsenewenger (24/8/09)

Hi All

Having a look through the reecipe DB and have seen many different grain weights for certain beers . I am sure it depends on the beer style but what is the maximum grain weight you could have for a 23l batch


Cheers
Aw


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## seemax (24/8/09)

In theory, as much as you want 

The grain weight is determined by your desired OG, no real relationship to beer style.

So... the higher the OG (and resultant ABV%) the more grain you require to extract the sugars from.


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## RetsamHsam (24/8/09)

arsenewenger said:


> Hi All
> 
> Having a look through the reecipe DB and have seen many different grain weights for certain beers . I am sure it depends on the beer style but what is the maximum grain weight you could have for a 23l batch
> 
> ...


if you are going for a big beer you may want to look into partigyle mashing..


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## t2000kw (25/8/09)

I believe the largest grain bill I had was about 10 kilograms in a 19 liter batch. Not that you can't go higher, but you may find that you end up sparging a lot of liquid to boil down later as you increase the amount of grain relative to your batch size. That could be a limitation for you.

A work-around for this (if you need one) is to use some light dried or liquid malt extract in place of some of your base grains and add that at boil time.


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## troopa (25/8/09)

What about BIAB .. 
How do you calculate your maximum grain bill for a pot for single batch amounts?
ie. how much room does 1 kilo of grain take up in a pot?

Tom


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## neonmeate (25/8/09)

or try the doble doble in Radical Brewing - run off only first runnings from 5kg malt then reheat to strike temp and use that to mash another fresh 5kg of grain with


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## crundle (25/8/09)

Troopa said:


> What about BIAB ..
> How do you calculate your maximum grain bill for a pot for single batch amounts?
> ie. how much room does 1 kilo of grain take up in a pot?
> 
> Tom



For BIAB in a 40 litre urn, I can normally fit up to 7kg of grain along with about 31 litres of water. This gives a bit of room at the top to stir in the grain nicely, and I normally give the grain a bit of a sparge with around half the volume of the grain bill of boiling water in a bucket after pulling it out of the urn to help get some more sugar out more easily than just by squeezing alone. This has been the result of going off of the experiences of others who BIAB, and Pistol Patch is currently getting data from BIAB'ers to work out the range of ratios used and the corresponding extraction of sugars.

Part of what dictates how much water to use in BIAB is the evaporation rate of the boil. In my system, I like to start with 31-33 litres of water, then lose about 0.5l/kg of grain used after squeezing the bag. Then I sparge with however much water I have lost to the grain to bring me back to just under the volume of water I started with. This requires a 90 minute boil to get me down to about 24-25 litres in the urn, to which I lose about 0.5l to hot break by using a pool filter bag for the last 2 litres of wort in the urn going into a cube. I could use more water, but then would be boiling for longer, which is not a bad thing if you are able to get more efficiency from your system, but I have tried it and seen no real gain to extend my boil to 2 hours, and have found that 90 minutes is great for me.

It is hard to say how much room the grain takes up in a pot, as you can adjust the water to grain ratio to thicken up the mash so you can fit more grain in, but you will then have to give it more of a sparge like a traditional system to extract the sugars from the grain without suffering woeful efficiency. I think dry grain has in the order of 4% water in it, so I assume that it would absorb a fair amount of water while mashing, but as to how much the grain expands I have no idea.

cheers,

Crundle


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## buttersd70 (25/8/09)

arsenewenger said:


> Hi All
> 
> Having a look through the reecipe DB and have seen many different grain weights for certain beers . I am sure it depends on the beer style but what is the maximum grain weight you could have for a 23l batch
> 
> ...






Troopa said:


> What about BIAB ..
> How do you calculate your maximum grain bill for a pot for single batch amounts?
> ie. how much room does 1 kilo of grain take up in a pot?
> 
> Tom



In either case, the max grain size becomes a limitation of the equipment being used to mash it, whether that is a tun, or biab. 

grain volume is 0.652 L per kg of grain (according to beersmith default). Then you have the grist/ liquor ratio, which (for conventional tuns) is around 2.5-3 L/kg. You can mash thicker, and you can mash thinner...but you can only go so far. 2L/kg would probably be the minimum _practicable _amount (and personally I wouldn't want to mash that thick). 

biab is somewhat different, as you need to allow, instead of grist ratio, for the water for your preboil volume + loss to grain, as well as the displacement of the grain itself. Thirstyboy did a post only a few days to a week ago (from memory) in (i think) either the biab thread, or bjorn's thread about his small pot biab attempt. I'm not familiar enough with biab to be confident in my answer, so might wanna look that up. Someone did mention, though, that the short rule of thumb is pot size/8 = max weight of grain (to be easily done...not a definitive number)

Either way, you can mash more grain in a tun than you can biab in a pot (if the pot and the tun are the same size), because in the biab pot, you need to fit everything in the pot in one hit; with a tun, you only need to fit the mash water, and then it's drained for the sparge water.


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## t2000kw (25/8/09)

buttersd70 said:


> In either case, the max grain size becomes a limitation of the equipment being used to mash it, whether that is a tun, or biab.



I've done a two-stop mash, doing 1/2 the mash in a small lauter tun then the other 1/2 after I was done, combining the two collections of wort into the boil pots. (I had only the kitchen stove to do my boil at the time with various kitchen pots.)

Don


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