Thirsty Boy
ICB - tight shorts and poor attitude. **** yeah!
- Joined
- 21/5/06
- Messages
- 4,544
- Reaction score
- 106
OP was mashing in an eski remember - boiling in a 15L pot. So say a 14L pre-boil would mean that with reasonable BIAB style absorption he would be mashing 5kg of grain in 16-17L of water, for a mash volume of about 20L.. which will fit in most eskis I think.
A 15L pot is on the very very small side for what you propose to do - Nicks experience tells us that its fairly reasonable to make full size batches in a 19L pot... you are flirting with teh edges of impossible dropping it down to 15L.
You can get a 19L pot from BigW or somewhere like that for not a lot more than $20... I think that investment would be worth it even if money is your main limiting factor. Then Nicks method is as good as any of the compromise methods
I also think that a full size pot and full volume boils is far more likely to result in good beer - but if money is your limiting factor, then I guess sacrifices need to be made.
The other thing for the OP to consider - is that with an eski and a 15L pot already in your armory (I am going to assume you do by a bigger pot to boil in OK) - you have got yourself a perfectly good batch sparge traditional mashing system. You will find, and this might be important to you, that there are more people around, with more experience and more relevant advice to give - about mashing in a multiple vessel system. In person advice can make all the difference. I'm not saying that you shouldn't use a bag... but really, your system isn't BIAB, it doesn't really retain any features of BIAB as a method except for the bag itself - so you will be doing yourself a disservice by locking your mindset into BIAB and the advice, good bad or otherwise, that you get from people regarding BIAB. I would start looking at batch sparging and threads devoted to that - its much closer to what you plan to do than BIAB is, and I suspect that you are more likely to get good beer out the other end of an almost normal batch sparge system, than by trying to push the BIAB paradigm to its absolute extremes.
TB
edit - it turns out that I have said much the same thing as Manticle... I just type slower
A 15L pot is on the very very small side for what you propose to do - Nicks experience tells us that its fairly reasonable to make full size batches in a 19L pot... you are flirting with teh edges of impossible dropping it down to 15L.
You can get a 19L pot from BigW or somewhere like that for not a lot more than $20... I think that investment would be worth it even if money is your main limiting factor. Then Nicks method is as good as any of the compromise methods
I also think that a full size pot and full volume boils is far more likely to result in good beer - but if money is your limiting factor, then I guess sacrifices need to be made.
The other thing for the OP to consider - is that with an eski and a 15L pot already in your armory (I am going to assume you do by a bigger pot to boil in OK) - you have got yourself a perfectly good batch sparge traditional mashing system. You will find, and this might be important to you, that there are more people around, with more experience and more relevant advice to give - about mashing in a multiple vessel system. In person advice can make all the difference. I'm not saying that you shouldn't use a bag... but really, your system isn't BIAB, it doesn't really retain any features of BIAB as a method except for the bag itself - so you will be doing yourself a disservice by locking your mindset into BIAB and the advice, good bad or otherwise, that you get from people regarding BIAB. I would start looking at batch sparging and threads devoted to that - its much closer to what you plan to do than BIAB is, and I suspect that you are more likely to get good beer out the other end of an almost normal batch sparge system, than by trying to push the BIAB paradigm to its absolute extremes.
TB
edit - it turns out that I have said much the same thing as Manticle... I just type slower
