Making Beer In A Small Pot: Biag 23 Liters Of Beer In 20 Liter Pot

[BjornJ]

Creating a new thread here for advice/comments on making a full-batch of beer in a small pot.


Equipment: 20 liter pot from BigW, grain bag, stove top, thermometer

I wanted to make an AG beer, BIAG is the only option living in a small apartment.
I have done this once before with only my 20 liter pot, but only made a small batch of beer.

This time I wanted to go for the full 23 liters in the fermenter.
I usually brew low-to-mid strength beers, so hoping the lower grain bill would make it ok in a small pot.
If nothing else this is just another way of showing it can all be done with limited equipment.
Aiming for a high mashing temperature to create a less fermentable wort.

Short story: Making a Porter @home
4.6 kg of grains in 69 degrees water.
mashed 60 minutes plus 30 minutes for heating up to mash-out = total mash time 90 minutes.
Boil time: 30 minutes to boiling point plus skimming + 60 minute for boiling hops.
Diluted with water up to 23 liters in the fermenter.
OG: 1032.
Using low attenuation yeast WhiteLabs English Ale Yeast WLP002 to leave lots of sugars in the beer
to give it body as I am starting out with very low OG.
Bitterness: IBU 25.8
Color: 51.7 (black)
Aiming for about 3 % alc



Longer story:
All grains/hops ready on the table before starting, adding everything to beersmith.


Grains:
2.00 kg of Marris Otter 5 EBC
1.20 kg of Munich 18 EBC
0.40 kg of Crystal 145 EBC
0.20 kg of Amber 40 EBC
0.40 kg of Chocolate 900 EBC
0.20 kg of Carapils 3.5 EBC
0.20 kg of Brown malt 150 EBC
total 4.6 kg




Heated 9.5 liters of water to 70 degrees, I was afraid to use any more water and still fit the grains.
After adding the grains I had to add about 1.5 liters of boiling water, then about a liter of cold water
again to adjust the temperature, ending on 69 degrees before wrapping the pot in a blanket.

getting ready:

adding grains:


measuring the temperature:

Thick mash!


mashing:





After 60 minutes the temperature was 68 degrees, turned heat to full to get mash-out temperature.
This helps beer stability and clearity, aiming to keep the pot at 77-78 degrees for 10 minutes.
This process on my stove top took 30 minutes, so total mash time ended up being 90 minutes.

Removed the grain bag from the pot, hanged it over another pot to drain.
I did no sparging whatsoever, only squeezed the bag every now and then, and poured what came out into the
boiling pot.
draining the grain bag in another pot:



It took about 30 minutes to bring the pot to the boil, and skim off the hotbreak.
I added about 1.5-2.5 liters of water during the boil to keep boiling volume at 9 liters.

I filled a glass with wort and put in the fridge until it was 20 degrees, OG was 1.088.

hops:

I boiled hops in the wort,
bag 1: 60 minutes boiling (10 grams East Kent Goldings 3%, 20 gr Challenger 7 %)
bag 2: 20 minutes boiling (20 gr Goldings, 10 gr Challenger)
bag 3: 5 minutes boiling time (10 gr Goldings)

Then after 60 minutes, so the last bag only got 5 minutes in the water, I removed the hop bags
and put the kettle in the sink with ice and cold water, lid on. Sprayed the pot/lid/bench with sanitizer
just in case.
Kept replacing the water for about an hour, added 6 liters of filtered water from the fridge to reduce temperature
as well. (all water used was filtered through our little filter mug and stored on 2 and 4 liter PET bottles)

Used beersmith to calculate what the OG would be depending on how much water I diluted the wort with.
If I went to 23 liters I would get an OG of 1.032.
This was a little lower than expected, I had hoped for 1.036 but still went for the full volume not to screw with the bittering.
Siphoned the wort into the fermenter splashing a bit, then added water up to 23 liters by adding some water from the bottle
then shaking it violently to aerate it!

Pitched 1 vial of WhiteLabs English Ale Yeast WLP002 at 20 degrees in 23 liters of wort in the fermenter and put it in the wardrobe.


What I should have done differently :
1: Sparging.
Had I used some of the water I used to dilute to sparge, I would probably have gotten a better OG than 1.032.
In hindsight it may had been smarter to aim for 1.040, but then again I am making a low/mid-strength beer,
so hoping to low attenuation yeast will be enough to leave the beer not too thin.

2: Kettle finings.
When I was going to add the Whirlfloc tablet 15 minutes before the end of the boil, I realised I had none..
Not sure what happened, but will make sure I have some before trying again.
I clearly remember buying a bag of 10 and using 1 the first time I brewed AG, no idea what happened to the bag. :unsure:



What I am unsure of:
3: Boil volume.
The grain/water mix was very thick, like a porride almost. The thermometer stood by itself in the mix when
measuring the temperature. I used a "potato masher" to stir the grains and move things around, afraid the temperature
in the bottom of the pot would be higher than in the top.
Does the fact that I only had about 11-12 liters of water reduce the amount of "sugar water" I got from my 4.6 kg of grains,
I do not know.
Does the fact that I boiled the hops in 1.088 (at 20 degrees) wort do anything to the hop utilisation?
Will I get more or less bittering than expected? I assumed that as people boil high-gravity stouts, me boiling the hops
at double gravity before diluting with water would be ok as well. But that is a guess from my side, I am sure there are
more technical explanations.

 

[BjornJ]

Dark wort, eh?


The grain bag after it was drained:


what was skimmed off:


cooling the wort in the sink took about an hour:


siphoning the wort into the fermenter, splashing it around.
Could just have poured it of course, but have a racking cane.


the shaken up yeast, a low attenuation WLP002 yeast to leave lots of body (hopefully)
This yeast is reported as ultra flocculent, so it should leave a nice, clear beer.

 

[QldKev]

Good story.

I would not worry about the 4.6kg grain to water ratio, it is basically what the traditional AG uses. If you under shoot your gravity you can always add some LDME to help push it up. Using the reduced boil method the hop utilisation would be reduced so you will need to add more. I would take a guess at 5-10% more, someone on here will give you a more exact calculation. I would not be too worried at this stage, taste this batch once it is ready and if you think it needs more hops, you will know for next time.

This is something I have been thinking about for a while. I'm currently doing single batch BIAB in a 40L pot, but would love to do a 50L batch to save time. I do have a larger pot (82L) I could use, but I need to make some sort of stand to sit it on, and also look at upgrading my burner; so thats the future.

QldKev

 

[marlow_coates]

Top job

Another great example of how to get into AG, without spending a heap.

You could always split some of the grain off, into a smaller pot, and have 2 mashes going at once?
Or just get the bigger pot?

Marlow

 

[tdack]

This is pretty much what I do, although I limit myself to about 3 - 3.5 kg of grain max.

I do the mash in about 6 to 7 litres of water and then do a dunk sparge into another pot with 5 or 6 litres of water.

This gives me around 13 or 14 litres of wort to boil up - about the most that I can safely boil in my 20L pot on the stove (without SWMBO getting cranky at the mess I make).

I make up the extra fermentables with a tin of unhopped goo or with dry malt extract.

I usually end up with 10 to 11 litres of wort into the fermenter and top that up to 20L for the final ferment.

 

[seemax]

For a 1.080 SG wort, you will get something in the order of 30% LOWER hop utilisation compared to 1.040. Therefore you would need to add extra hops to get the same IBU

 

[barry2]

Thanks BjornJ for the story.Being another stovetop brewer myself I often wondered how others brew on the electric stove.
If I am brewing all grain I use 2.5kg grain and use a 15 litre Willow esky as a mash tun.I add a total of 10 litres of hot water being a combination of water from the hot water system and boiling water from the electric jug/s to get the desired mash temperature.Then insulate the esky with a carton and blanket and leave for 75 minutes.I then strain the liquid through a large chef's strainer into my 12 litre stockpot and usually get about 6 litres of liquid which I then start to boil.In the meantime I have added 5 litres of hot water to the esky to sparge the grain for 15 minutes.The 4 litres I get is added to the pot to give me a commencing boil of 10 litres.I partially cover the pot with a heavy glass lid and finish with an after boil 8.8 litres.
I top this up in the fermenter to 12.5 litres and the OG is around 1035.I use dry yeasts and the FG is around 1010.
If I am brewing grain with extract or grain with kit I use the same procedure for the grain and add the extract/kit at the end of the boil.However I top up to 23 litres and usually have a OG of 1035 to 1042 and a FG of 1010

 

[canon1ball]

Well done, Bjorn, nice documentation!

I leave your questions to the more experienced brewers to answer.

On another note: can you burn your pic's on a DVD and bring them to the next meeting? You could show and explain them to the rest of the gang and like ours last time; it might inspire more of our club members to start all grain brewing and you demonstrate clearly it can be done with BIAB in an apartment!

Pete

 

[BjornJ]

On another note: can you burn your pic's on a DVD and bring them to the next meeting? You could show and explain them to the rest of the gang and like ours last time; it might inspire more of our club members to start all grain brewing and you demonstrate clearly it can be done with BIAB in an apartment!

Pete

Sure can, Pete!

Too bad I won't have time to bottle and mature, it would have been cool to serve the beer while showing the pictures, hehe.
Bjorn

 

[canon1ball]

it would have been cool to serve the beer while showing the pictures, hehe.

Yeah, but then again Porter doesn't fit in with the Oktoberfest theme anyway, does it?
Disguise it as a Schwarzbier maybe?

 

[RdeVjun]

Good work Bjorn! No, in fact it is great work and that's fantastic! Here's a guy not afraid of having a chop at it and me tips me lid!

I've been doing exactly this as a routine for a while now, we have much the same equipment in fact, and indeed it can work for regular- sized batches (i.e. >21L). Yes, there may be hop utilisation issues, however, an extra few clams- worth of hops are easily affordable when your conversion to an all grain system outlay is a good deal less than 50 big ones. That's something to really think about if the initial expense is an issue. But, if you're not impressed or convinced, there's always partial mash and extract to add or just working with smaller batches, and neither of which should be simply discounted.

I'd also suggest that a sparge of about 1/3 of the initial volume with ~85C water will improve the efficiency enormously, I usually measure SG of 2nd runnings, if it can be called that, of 1/2 to 2/3 of the first's. There's little need to squeeze the bag much with this method either and the pot volume at the start of the boil should end up slightly higher than where it was before raining in.

BTW, Troy, in my experience there's no real problem boiling up a 19L stockpot with about 17L of wort, you could scale your volumes up a shade with ease, the mash volume in particular, but of course the final fermenter SG is the real prize we're all after, and if you achieve that then its all good. I do full pots regularly, obviously its on a knife edge for boilovers, but common garden- variety kitchen stoves are hardly mongolian blowtorches and I've not had one to date.

 

[crundle]

Great pictorial to go with the post BjornJ! Excellent information for others to follow who would like to give AG a try but don't have the equipment many of us would probably take for granted to get them underway. Please follow up with feedback on how your brew tastes when it is ready, I am keen to see how the hop utilisation went especially, as your method of squeezing out a single batch in a 20 litre pot is giving me an idea of perhaps trying a double batch of an English mild in a 40 litre pot.

cheers,

Crundle

 

[BjornJ]

Thanks guys for the kind words!

I peeked in the wardrobe last night, not sure if it the liquid yeast but it is slow to start. Last night it was almost 24 hours since pitching and there was a bit of bubbles on the surface, like a layer of head more than actual foam. This morning there was a tiny whiff of yeast smell when opening the wardrobe door and a little bit of foam on the top. So at least it has started fermenting by now, woohoo :lol:
Everytime I looked the temperature was 20 degrees, this weather is brilliant for brewing.



Was thinking more about what several have now said about sparging, and you are of course right.
I should have sparged, to increase my OG.

On the one side I am happy I got the low OG as I am trying to create a lower alcohol level
-low OG
-low attenuation yeast
-high mashing temperature
-dark grains

On the other it may have been better to aim for a 1.040 OG as we are talking porter here, not a black lager..


You are probably right RdeVjun, sparging with say 5 liters of hot water in another pot by just putting the grain bag in that pot and stirring it would have helped.

I still have a couple of cards up my sleeve if necessary:
1:Measure FG and if not happy, add some DME and stir the yeast up, leave it for another week then measure OG again.
2: Measure FG and if not happy, add some maltodextrin and stir the yeast up, etc.

But knowing myself I will probably just keep it as is as an experiment. Then ignore all comments from canon1ball and the others finding it way to thin, loving it like a first-born! At least I can then drink them all myself

Thanks again guys, appreciate the feedback and suggestions,

Bjorn

 

[RdeVjun]

Goodonya Bjorn, glad to see it is kicking off. That whiff on opening the fridge/ cupboard door is such a relief when doing ales, although I'm just about to pitch a couple of lagers in another fridge and I'm not looking forward to the farty byproducts with them.

I think there's a few hops utilisation issues with the higher SG wort in the boil, I haven't ever been 100% satisfied with the hops levels in most of mine done with this method to date. But I complicate things with NCing as well, so I am grappling with several parameters at once (not to mention yeast, am using 1469 presently).
Getting a bit OT, but I also have a laboratory heat exchanger to set up and test that cooling method too, its glass so I'll have to be very careful (scabbed it from the skip, what a score!). So, I'd recommend people be prepared to adjust the hops quantities, but as I said previously, this is fairly trivial when the upfront costs to go AG are minimal.

I actually mashed another DrS' TTL- inspired ale late last night, boiled it in the pot and then chilled it in the laundry tub, so hopefully this non- NC batch will give me a clearer picture about hop utilisation. I feel some of its predecessors have been too dry so I'm using a higher mash temperature for this batch. I was pitching on to a 1469 yeastcake in a smaller fermenter so I was happy with the slightly smaller volume with this batch.
Here's the data if anyone's interested, and critiques are always welcome. Sorry, its from qbrew (a freebie), so colour is SRM and it doesn't show ingredient concentrations (i.e. AA%, grain colour, extract potential etc.) in this report format, also its efficiency is set at 80% and as you can see I'm pretty much achieving that although I did increase the volume at pitching.

DrS'/TTL VIII
--------
Brewer: RCd
Style: Extra Special/Strong Bitter (English Pale Ale)
Batch: 15.00 L All Grain

Characteristics
---------------
Recipe Gravity: 1.048 OG
Recipe Bitterness: 34 IBU
Recipe Color: 10 SRM
Estimated FG: 1.012
Alcohol by Volume: 4.6%
Alcohol by Weight: 3.6%

Ingredients
-----------
Golden Promise Malt 2.50 kg, Grain, Mashed
German Munich 0.26 kg, Grain, Mashed
Melanoidan malt 0.08 kg, Grain, Mashed
British chocolate malt 0.04 kg, Grain, Mashed

Fuggles 22.50 g, Pellet, 90 minutes
EKG 22.50 g, Pellet, 20 minutes
Styrian Goldings 11.25 g, Plug, 5 minutes
Styrian Goldings 6.00 g, Plug, 0 minutes

5.2 1.00 unit, Additive, 1 tsp
Whirlfloc 0.30 unit, Additive, 1/3 tab
British Ale yeast 1.00 unit, Yeast, 1469 West Yorkshire
Gelatine 1.00 unit, Fining, 10g Added with hop tea

Notes
-----
Recipe Notes:
0 minute hops are dry hopped/ hop tea added near the end of primary fermentation.

Batch Notes:
Aiming for minimal post- boil dilution.
Slightly higher mash temp than usual.
Rainwater as per usual.
Uncovered 90 minute boil.
Chill in laundry tub, strain into fermenter.

Target Mash Temperature: 68C Strike Water: ~15L @ 73C
Mash: Start: 68.5C @ 2210 End: 65.0C (?) @ 2340
First Runnings SG: 1.048 @ 20C
Sparge Water: 4L @ ~90C
Sparge SG: 1.026 @ 20C
Post-boil SG: ~14L of 1.052 @ 20C
Additions: 4L Tap Water (cold, direct into fermenter before pitching.)
Pitching: SG 1.042 @ 20C (a little lower than the target.), straight onto 1469 yeastcake from GD1.
​

 

[BjornJ]

Ingredients
-----------
Golden Promise Malt 2.50 kg, Grain, Mashed
German Munich 0.26 kg, Grain, Mashed
Melanoidan malt 0.08 kg, Grain, Mashed
British chocolate malt 0.04 kg, Grain, Mashed

What is the melanoidan malt, is that just a darker malt or does it have any special attributes?

It's great fun mixing the different grains, isn't it?

Bjorn

 

[buttersd70]

What is the melanoidan malt, is that just a darker malt or does it have any special attributes?

It's great fun mixing the different grains, isn't it?

Bjorn

For want of a better term, it's a very malty malt, if you know what I mean.

link

 

[BjornJ]

Hmm, interesting.
I have seen it in the homebrew shop and noticed the name, but never read of it.

thanks Butters,

Bjorn

 

[tdack]

Bjorn, I shop at Dave's too ... in fact it was his "Stove top brewery" box kits that got me into partials, mashing and making my own recipes.

RdeVjun said, your hop utilisation isn't as good with the higher gravity wort, but I figure a couple of dollars of hops is worth it for the taste in the end. I also no-chill some of my batches, so far I've been really happy with the results.

My main constraint is physical space for an AG setup, I'd like to, but just can't at the moment, so this way works well for me.

I've also adjusted my brewing software (BeerAlchemy for OS X) to account for the smaller sized boils that I do, so it takes all the hard work out of calculating hop usage.

It is good fun mixing the different grains, but I've now started on single malt and single hop beers ... I've ended up with a couple of cracker "pale ales", now I have empty kegs to fill - must get the NSW Xmas Case Swap cubes into the fermenters!

 

[RdeVjun]

Just trying to nut out some numbers for high- SG boil hops. As we've seen elsewhere, there's handful of hypotheses, some with extraordinarily complex and detailed maths and most brewers will not be arsed working bittering out to such a high degree of precision, particularly when there's not a real consensus about which method is actually correct. The good news though is that there's a chart:

Source: http://users.rcn.com/thor.dnai/dboard/dbnewsl/t9510d.htm

Its a bit ironic using the end of boil SG, but at least its something, although in the published forms, one of them, Tinseth I think uses a sort of whole- boil average but has been adapted here, at least that's how I read it.

How to use this? Well, basically look up the estimated end of boil SG, pull off the factor and apply it to your calculated IBU. So for Bjorn's 1.080 boil, the rate is between 10 and 20% (i.e. a factor of between 0.9 and 0.8 depending in which method) and this is roughly the reduction in hop utilisation efficiency. So you can adjust the hopping up to account for this. It may be worth checking though if your brewing software is doing this already, I'm not sure about that at all.

I'd imagine that this would be best applied in conjunction with past experiences, I know this might take some trial and effort to get a feel for, but the data isn't that thick on the ground and there isn't agreement over which method is actually right.

Another useful reference: http://www.realbeer.com/hops/FAQ.html

Please, if I've misinterpreted any of this, I'd be glad to hear.

 

[BjornJ]

Hey, that was a very useful graph!

It is now saved in my "beer" folder full of useful little goodies such as spredsheets to calculate kits/extracts, Butters' Calculator, Kit IBUs, isinglass article, etc.
One I use every time is this one,


I find it very useful when pondering how long to boil the hops, something along the lines of "hmm..do we boil the cascade for 20 minutes to get max flavour and still some aroma, or do we we boil the cascade for 30, then the Saaz for 10 minutes for more flavour than aroma, but still some aroma?".
Maybe the most enjoyable part of the whole brewing process, playing around with the recipe and adding a bit here, changing a bit here, and saying "mmm.." and "hmmm.." like I really understand what a difference in IBU from 22 to 27 tastes like, hehe

Thanks for taking the time to post this, RdeVjun. I have now learned why I was supposed to boil the hops at 1.040 like I had read somewhere and forgotten. I have also learned an easy way to calculate the hop utilisation at different OGs, brilliant.

From this I learn that
-my Porter will not be 25.8 IBU like calculated in beersmith, but somewhere between 20-22 IBU. This is within the style according to beersmith, a brown porter going all the way down to 18. (let's just ignore the fact it is the first porter I ever make and wouldn't know if it was supposed to taste any different)
-when doing something like this again, if I do not go to the Esky model, I will calculate the hops using beersmith and this graph to find the corrected hop amounts, using the OG of the wort before boiling hops. This is not "after boil OG" but as long as the volume is the same by adding water during the boil, it will be fairly close as the only matter leaving the kettle is what I skim off.

thanks again,

Bjorn