Biab:getting The Wort Out Of A Hanging Bag.

[jezza79]

Using the bag purchased from craft brewer and grain crushed by craft brewer (default crush, didn't ask for anything special) I get wort pooling above the grain in the bag while I am lifting it. However it all drains out in a predictable fashion starting with a fast drain and finishing with drips some times later.

I also find that twisting the bag can give it an all-over squeeze. If you have the bag hanging just twist it around until it's nice and tight and wort will come out again. Probably easier than squeezing it the normal way and probably less likely to let crap come out of the grain.

so did i(all from craft brewer).........i also was twisting until i did the method i have mentioned above..... try it, no more twisting needed!

 

[QldKev]

Using the bag purchased from craft brewer and grain crushed by craft brewer (default crush, didn't ask for anything special) I get wort pooling above the grain in the bag while I am lifting it. However it all drains out in a predictable fashion starting with a fast drain and finishing with drips some times later.

I also find that twisting the bag can give it an all-over squeeze. If you have the bag hanging just twist it around until it's nice and tight and wort will come out again. Probably easier than squeezing it the normal way and probably less likely to let crap come out of the grain.

I was at a fellow brewers place the other day for a brew day to determine a certain flavour evident in all their brews. They had one of the craft brewer bags and sure enough it pooled above the grain. The grain was cracked using the same mill as I use, and about the same setting. The bag is def a lot finer drainage than the traditional swiss viole. (not the cause of why I was there) All I can think is to remove the bag in steps from the brew to allow it to drain properly.

I know it is heavily debated, but I don't like the squeeze the bag technique due to possible tannin extraction.

QldKev

 

[jezza79]

I was at a fellow brewers place the other day for a brew day to determine a certain flavour evident in all their brews. They had one of the craft brewer bags and sure enough it pooled above the grain. The grain was cracked using the same mill as I use, and about the same setting. The bag is def a lot finer drainage than the traditional swiss viole. (not the cause of why I was there) All I can think is to remove the bag in steps from the brew to allow it to drain properly.

I know it is heavily debated, but I don't like the squeeze the bag technique due to possible tannin extraction.

QldKev

hence the wobble

 

[Rowy]

I've only done 10 Biabs but I shake, as the OP describes, then go with a dunk sparge. I I hold back about 5ltrs from the initial mash for this. After that I let the bag drain in a handy pail with holes in the bottom inside another handy pail which I have put a tap in. This sits on a milk crate and the runnings drain from the pail set up into a pot. While this is all happening I start the boil.

 

[Nick JD]

I know it is heavily debated, but I don't like the squeeze the bag technique due to possible tannin extraction.

This statement is why it's debated. Husks sitting in 65C water for an hour ... no tannin extraction. Giving the bag a squeeze ... TANNINS! WTF?

It's a pH thing that 3V brewers risk when they pour hot, pH 7 water all over their grain husks. If you don't do this you don't get tannins.

I crush fine and squeeze the living shit out of the bag and have never had tannin issues - if you have issues with squeezing and fine milling then you'd hate Coopers Pale Ale because it should be full of tannins as they do the same thing albeit on a huge scale.

Squeezing = tannins is an old wive's tale created by anti-BIAB dickheads when they realised BIAB was way easier and their sparging techniques were a tannin hotspot.

 

[Rowy]

This statement is why it's debated. Husks sitting in 65C water for an hour ... no tannin extraction. Giving the bag a squeeze ... TANNINS! WTF?

It's a pH thing that 3V brewers risk when they pour hot, pH 7 water all over their grain husks. If you don't do this you don't get tannins.

I crush fine and squeeze the living shit out of the bag and have never had tannin issues - if you have issues with squeezing and fine milling then you'd hate Coopers Pale Ale because it should be full of tannins as they do the same thing albeit on a huge scale.

Squeezing = tannins is an old wive's tale created by anti-BIAB dickheads when they realised BIAB was way easier and their sparging techniques were a tannin hotspot.

Well that was straight forward Nick I must say

 

[mudd]

Last week me and a mate did our first BIAB (...how cool are we) B)

Between the two of us we rung the crap out of it but I still thought there was still some of the oh so sweet wort retained. So the dunk sparge may be the next step.

 

[bum]

Lucky no BIAB brewers have their grain bill crushed by a LHBS or are inclined towards pouring hot water over the bag to "sparge".

Good advice, as ever.

 

[Rowy]

Lucky no BIAB brewers have their grain bill crushed by a LHBS or are inclined towards pouring hot water over the bag to "sparge".

Good advice, as ever.

I live 10 mins from Craftbrewer and they crush and mix mine. Tried sparging early by slowly pouring hot water over grain in the bag but couldn't get the efficiency right. I was told that instead of running through the grain and bag a fair proportion of the water was probably running down the sides. My observations whilst sparging tended to support this. A dunk sparge with 80 plus degree water and a good stir at the same time has increased my efficiency by heaps. Works for me anyway.

 

[kelbygreen]

maybe squeezing the bag put more stuff in the boil that may extract tannins when boiled. I used to just hang my bag up and let it drain the liquid coming out was clear and aposed to the white liquid when I squeezed.

I am all for BIAB its a great step but to me its a step I dont think I would go back to BIAB but it was a great place to start. I aint arguing whats better just saying to me I got cloudy wort and bad efficiency out of BIAB and going 3v fixed all them issues. Sure people do it for time but it takes me 5 hours from setting thing up and cleaning and packing things away to do 42lts of beer.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

I've not seen a Craftbrewer bag in person, so I speculate..

Sounds like they are "finer" than a voile bag - this isn't bad, maybe its even good. But it also means that some of the advice you read about BIAB and how it will behave, wont apply. The "base" advice about BIAB is going to assume voile, and how it behaves. You use something different - expect different results.

I personally would call it "wrong" mainly because its not how I do it it of course... but also because part of the beauty of the method is its 1, 2, 3 - everything just works type nature. The whole having to jiggle, wobble, poke etc the bag doesnt' sit well with me from that perspective. It also makes things heavier than needed. Pull it out, let it hang a while, maybe give it a bit of a squeeze... thats as complex as it needs to be, and if a different choice of material makes it even a little harder than that?? Well I guess the beauty of a decent quality pre-made bag goes a way to compensating, maybe all the way - but I like my brew day to be simple and I'm willing to do a bit more work up front to make it so.

Mind you - most of my BIAB brew days these days are at demos, and we use Spillsmostofit's BIAB bag. So I did none of the work at all. It does all work nice and easy though.

 

[stux]

I've not seen a Craftbrewer bag in person, so I speculate..

Sounds like they are "finer" than a voile bag - this isn't bad, maybe its even good. But it also means that some of the advice you read about BIAB and how it will behave, wont apply. The "base" advice about BIAB is going to assume voile, and how it behaves. You use something different - expect different results.

I personally would call it "wrong" mainly because its not how I do it it of course... but also because part of the beauty of the method is its 1, 2, 3 - everything just works type nature. The whole having to jiggle, wobble, poke etc the bag doesnt' sit well with me from that perspective. It also makes things heavier than needed. Pull it out, let it hang a while, maybe give it a bit of a squeeze... thats as complex as it needs to be, and if a different choice of material makes it even a little harder than that?? Well I guess the beauty of a decent quality pre-made bag goes a way to compensating, maybe all the way - but I like my brew day to be simple and I'm willing to do a bit more work up front to make it so.

Mind you - most of my BIAB brew days these days are at demos, and we use Spillsmostofit's BIAB bag. So I did none of the work at all. It does all work nice and easy though.

I've only ever seen 100% polyester swiss voile from spotlight. but my bags behave like the OPs.

Is it possible that there are batch to batch variations on even swiss voile from spotlight? It certainly looks like a very very wine weave.

I've experimented with mill gaps, and I found that at 0.5mm I have severe issues draining the bag, but at 0.6mm the problems largely go away. I suspect the additional flour is clogging the gaps

 

[Mayor of Mildura]

I did an experiment the other day to test what the difference would be between a decoction and not doing a decoction on the same beer. Same grist from same bag of malt, same mill setting on same mill, same piece of voile (sewing is too fancy for me).

My decoction method was to mash in at 66 pull my decoction and add back to main mash to raise it to mash out. total time till draining bag about 90 minutes. The wort pooled up just like the OP and I had to squeeze.

The other beer was mashed at 66 for 90 minutes and then drained. The bag drained very quickly and freely with no pooling. No squeezing was required.

I reckon that the method of mashing impacts how the bag drains.

 

[DanteHicks]

I did my first BIAB last weekend and I put a colander in the bottom of my fermenter and swapped the bag from the urn to the fermenter. I then pegged the bag open around the outside of the fermenter and poured the sparge water directly onto the grain.

I just waited 20 mins or so for it to drain while the wort was getting to boiling temp, gave the bag a good squeeze and took it out. No need for holding or hanging or anything.

 

[iralosavic]

Has anyone done an efficiency comparison between full volume BIAB and sparging? What sort of difference can you expect between a good old drip n squeeze and a sparge and return?

 

[Nick JD]

Has anyone done an efficiency comparison between full volume BIAB and sparging? What sort of difference can you expect between a good old drip n squeeze and a sparge and return?

I get about 10% better efficiency when I do a bag dunk sparge - but with squeezing only, I get 70-75% so usually I don't bother.

 

[iralosavic]

I get about 10% better efficiency when I do a bag dunk sparge - but with squeezing only, I get 70-75% so usually I don't bother.

Numerically, 10% is fairly significant, but whether or not it warrants the extra effort is individual I suppose ... I don't brew all that often, so probably not worth it in my case.

By dunk sparging, do you mean lowering the sealed bag into a second vessle of clean water, allowing to settle then drip dry from above afterwards?

 

[MarkBastard]

For what it's worth, before I had a craft brewer bag I had a gryphon bag and the same thing happened (wort pooling above the grain).

There is no way in hell squeezing the bag extracts tannins. It definitely does extract some things you may not want in your beer though, dust or whatever very small particles are not liquid and are small enough to get through such a fine mesh. They presumably just add to the trub.

As for how people like to get this extra liquid from the bag. Whether it's waiting for gravity/cooling to do its work, squeezing, shaking, poking, or even sparging, who really gives a shit? I'd wager that for everybodies first BIAB they follow the expert instructions here that suggest none of it is needed, and then they find through experience that it is in fact needed for them, so they go about doing it. They probably try a lot of different ways to do it and settle on the one that's right for them. There's nothing wrong with that.

 

[Nick JD]

By dunk sparging, do you mean lowering the sealed bag into a second vessle of clean water, allowing to settle then drip dry from above afterwards?

I put about 1.5L of hot tap water in a 15L pot and dunk the drained bag in there. When the tension is off the rope all the garin seperates and I give it a few dunks - then pour another 1.5L over the top and leave it for a few minutes. Then I drain and squeeze. The shit that comes out is shockingly cloudy - but ya get that with BIAB sparging.

My "first runnings" are really quite clear.

I've set up my batch size to not require sparging anymore. I prefer the simplicity of not needing to do it.

 

[Truman42]

Has anyone done an efficiency comparison between full volume BIAB and sparging? What sort of difference can you expect between a good old drip n squeeze and a sparge and return?

Ive always dunk sparged and get a 10% increase in efficiency too. But the main reason I do it is to increase my batch volume to compensate for evaporation loss during the boil. Or my 18 litre urn would only give me around 10-12 litres if that.