Mini Biab Partial

[Mantis]

I've done all my brewing in this way for a while now.
I have a 12lt pot into which I put about 6 lt water and get it to 70C.
Put in bag and 1.8kg(or thereabouts) grain and stir which brings the temp down to 66.
Wrap in towel and leave for 60 min
Turn burner back on and bring up to 70C (if 75 is better then I will do this , thanks)
Leave for 5mins then lift bag
For a crude sparge I pour a 2lt kettle of water at 75C though the bag after draining it, and squeeze out all I can
Boil and hop for 60 min
Turn off burner and add 1 or 2 cans extract
Cool and into fermenter that I have added the required amount of water to bring up to 25lt


Works well and I am loving the beer :icon_chickcheers:

 

[MarkBastard]

Cheers Mantis.

I have yet another question, should I be worrying about PH levels for an entry level tutorial, or is it more a 'nice to have'. Reading http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter14-1.html and it's getting me thinking.

 

[Mantis]

Cheers Mantis.

I have yet another question, should I be worrying about PH levels for an entry level tutorial, or is it more a 'nice to have'. Reading http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter14-1.html and it's getting me thinking.

I havent worried about PH yet and to be honest havent bothered to read much about it.
I use tank water which should be PH 7 and I was under the impression that the grain itself is acidic and brings the water PH down.
If you were using town water that was softer then some gypsum would be called for I think
I am sure Butters could explain it better and a lot more acurately than me

It sure is an easy way to do partial brews though and a tutorial on it should get more folks into using grain by making it easier. :beer:

 

[buttersd70]

I am sure Butters could explain it better and a lot more acurately than me

No, not really. :lol:

I think that for the most part, stuffing around too much with the water is just....stuffing around. A little bit more calcium, maybe, from Gypsum or chalk, all subject to 'ish', depending on which way you want it to go (malty or hoppy)...possibly drop the pH of the sparge water if needed to about 6, like palmer reccomends, if it's particularly high in RA. Thats the max effort I've ever gone to. And I don't usually do anything at all. (to adelaide water.)

 

[MarkBastard]

Cheers fellas

 

[Thirsty Boy]

pH - wont really effect the "quality" of your beer... just the efficiency of your mash (mostly) So for beginners, its way to much to worry about.

You know, after a few months of doing it and you are getting consistently terrible efficiency... then eventually, after a fair few other things, you might look at pH as one of the possible problems. Apart from that... if you aren;t having issues, then don't even think about it.

You wont need to worry about pH in your sparge, neither BIAB or batch sparging suffers from the pH issue that fly spargers have to be careful about.

Talk to your local homebrew shops about whether you need to add anything to your water as a regular thing - for instance in Melbourne, the water doesn't have enough calcium for good yeast health - so you should add a little bit either as Calcium Chloride or as Gypsum... but I never knew that, my LHBS let me know. Talk to yours, or if there is a local brew club or other AG brewers in the area.

TB

 

[MarkBastard]

I think I'm going to make an all grain half batch using this method first, use my 15L jerry can from a FWK, and use my 9L party keg once done.

Then after that I'll make the above intended idea with the 1.5L LME and a full size batch. That way I've got a little bit more experience with the BIAB method plus I have an all grain sample to compare to.

I'm assuming if I make an all grain 10L batch I should just halve the hop additions, and not dump the LME in at the end, and that's it?

 

[kram]

Yeah halving it should get you about there. Without knowing your expected efficency you'll have to assume what it will be and do the recipe up in Beersmith to hit your desired IBUs. For a typical first full batch AG ~70% is a possible target, then there's those who have hit 80%+ on their first attempt. Good effort to them. I hit 60% for my first and after ironng things out through numerous batches, it's alot different now.

Efficiency is always based on your individual system, which you really don't know until you've done a few batches with the same process each time and have an idea of the efficiency you're getting. Once you know your expected efficiency you'll know what hop additions you will need to do to hit your desired targets.

 

[shellnaf]

I have a 12lt pot into which I put about 6 lt water and get it to 70C.

Mantis do u have a recipe using this method, I've been hunting around for all the stuff to do a biab. Reading about BOD's, kegs as kettles, burners, regulators blah blah blah, then I search and find this post by you. I have a 20L pot, so does that mean I can try to do a biab??

Thanks
Nathan

 

[SpillsMostOfIt]

... I have a 20L pot, so does that mean I can try to do a biab??

Thanks
Nathan

Of course you can! My old 'Pilot Plant' was a 20 litre pot I BIABed in on several occasions. You can brew smaller batches or brew high gravity and water down into the fermenter. Brewing smaller batches is good for honing your technique and you can still ferment it in whatever you're fermenting in at the moment.

 

[Mantis]

Mantis do u have a recipe using this method, I've been hunting around for all the stuff to do a biab. Reading about BOD's, kegs as kettles, burners, regulators blah blah blah, then I search and find this post by you. I have a 20L pot, so does that mean I can try to do a biab??

Thanks
Nathan

You could do a partial biab with your pot.
I have been making 25lt batchs with this method lately. Something like:
Using the method in above post

3kg Coopers light LME
1.5kg JW traditional ale grain
300g Crystal
Chinook or Por for bittering
Cascade for flavour hops
US-05 yeast

You could do the same but halve the LME and double the grain with your 20lt pot

Edit: Or do what spills says above while I was typing this

 

[shellnaf]

I'm hoping to do an ag biab, I gotta go to bed now so I'll read up a bit more tonight when I'm pretending to work.

Thanks for the quick replies.
Nathan

 

[shellnaf]

OK I've been searchiing for a lot of my shift, but now I need to ask - is it possible to do an all grain biab with a 20L pot? so expanding on that a little, is it possible to boil say 15L of wort then top up to 23L in the fermenter? and if so, does anybody have a recipe? OK one more question, if this isn't possible and I wanted to do a 15L biab and wanted to use a recipe in the DB, do I use the same percentage/ratio of everything? hops, grain, water etc.
I think this makes sense, it does to me but I've been "working" all night.

Thanks
Nathan

 

[Thirsty Boy]

OK I've been searchiing for a lot of my shift, but now I need to ask - is it possible to do an all grain biab with a 20L pot? so expanding on that a little, is it possible to boil say 15L of wort then top up to 23L in the fermenter? and if so, does anybody have a recipe? OK one more question, if this isn't possible and I wanted to do a 15L biab and wanted to use a recipe in the DB, do I use the same percentage/ratio of everything? hops, grain, water etc.
I think this makes sense, it does to me but I've been "working" all night.

Thanks
Nathan

I'll do some numbers for you later (if no one else beats me to it) ... but you will be pushing it to get a 23L batch of AG BIAB out of your 20L pot. You'll manage with a "small" beer like an ordinary bitter or something like that, but my guess is it will be close but no cigar for normal strength beers. Its a bit harder to brew high gravity with BIAB - the equations get a little complex. Like I said, I will run the numbers after work and can have definite figures for you then. after 10pm

BUT... why the obsession with 23L ??? Just because thats how much comes out of a coopers kit, you can brew however much you want. If doing pure AG is important to you and you want to try it with the pot you have... make less beer.

And yes - the recipes basically scale up and down proportionally - except the water will be different in a BIAB than in a "normal" mash. Do a couple of searches, the amount of water needed for BIAB brew has been discussed multiple times.

TB

 

[shellnaf]

yeah I gotta get 23 out of my head.
Thanks for the help
Nathan

 

[Bribie G]

I'm BIABing in a 40 L urn and I'm pushing it to the extreme with my UK best bitters that are coming out between 4.5 and 5% ABV for a 25 L batch. And I sometimes chuck some dex in to get that far, not because I'm a cheapie but because some styles like Burton use dex.

If you wanted to do a very strong brew in a 20 L pot ending up with 15 litres on boiling, and then dilute it up to 20 litres or more, then with that amount of grain you would need to do a good batch sparge to get reasonable extraction of the sugars at the end of the mash and would probably end up with more wort than the 20L pot could handle. It's like the old saying three into two won't go.

One thing you could theoretically do is to go ahead with your strong mash, hoist and drain the bag, then sideline it in a big bowl and do a boil with your 15 L of wort.
Then put bag back in pot for a sparge, hoist bag a second time to obtain a 'small beer' wort and do a second boil.
Blend the two at the end of the process.


But do you really want to spend 8 hours or whatever doing a mash, two drains and two separate boils? Sounds like a world of pain and I reckon after a the novelty had worn off you wouldn't be looking forward to brew day any more :huh: I'd tend to save up for a big pot instead.


BIAB is really designed to be a 'full volume' method where the water that goes into the pot initially is all the water you need, and isn't really suited to overgravity brewing, based on what I have experienced recently.

 

[shellnaf]

The main reason for trying this is to see the difference between K&B and ag (biab). Maybe to do this I should try a FWK from G&G. I'm not a big drinker (maybe 2 or 3 beers a week, hopefully I'm not seen as a freak) so I don't want to spend a ship load on equipment only to be used very occasionally. I enjoy the process of brewing more than anything else, I've done 1 extract brew isung DME, it's still in secondary ATM, tasted pretty good so far. So using a 20L for a full volume would maybe produce around 10L of wort??

Thanks again
Nat

 

[Bribie G]

Nat, if you are looking for a comparison of AG and Kits n Bits, then a partial mash is the way to go to explore the next 'stage' after kits and you will notice a huge improvement. I brew AG pommy style bitters using BIAB, but for an Oz style lager I have a partial recipe that I use again and again and again, I have no intention of migrating it to all grain because it's a really nice drop. I've got one going in the brew fridge at the moment. And you don't need to get a bag either. It turns out like a hoppier richer version of Melbourne Bitter without that horrible VB twang and doesn't have the home brew twang either. If interested, PM me for a recipe.

Back on topic , for that brew I now do a full mash and split the resulting well-hopped wort between four 5L cubes so I can whip up a partial very easily with a cube, a can of Coopers lager, a kilo of dex and Nottingham ale yeast. Almost instant.

However, before I went 'bulk' I would do, on each occasion, a 1kg partial in a container within an esky waterbath.



Very easy, and you don't need a bag because you can just use a big steel mesh kitchen strainer from a cheap shop. That container is now in the brew house and I keep my water salts, gelatine, polyclar etc in it

 

[Mantis]

If you only drink a couple of beers a week then AG in your pot is easy. Just fired up beersmith to which I have added (cant remember, but someone on here), a mash schedule for BIAB.
For a simple pale ale

2kg ale malt
300g crystal
Hops to your liking but I can suggest those if you like

Beersmith says start with 12.7lt of water, but I would round it up to 13
This would leave you with 10lt post boil to tip in the fermenter with a OG of around 1050

10lt isnt much but at 2-3 beers a week would last a while

 

[shellnaf]

bribie, just found the post about your Melb bitter, sounds like that might be the go for now.

Nathan