Mini Biab Partial

[Thirsty Boy]

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

Nathan

It all just depends - do you want, as you said, to just compare AG with kits?? If so, then Mantis gave you the perfect scenario. Make 10L of beer.

Any of the recipes in the database (of a "normal" sort of strength) will pretty much just scale linearly down to that 10L size.

Grain as per the scaled down recipe (around 2.5kg worth..)
Hops as per the scaled down recipe
13L of water @ about 2C above the mash temperature in the recipe (check temp after adding bag to pot)
Pour in grain, stir well.
Mash 1 hr (whatever temp the recipe says, insulate with some towels or something to hold the temp)
After an hour - Pop it on the stove, stir continuously while you raise the temperature to 76-78C
Pull bag and drain/squeeze (rubber gloves)
Start boil (you should have around 11.75L)
A nice rolling boil for 1hr adding hops etc as per recipe. Not a "hard" boil, just so its rolling along quietly (using a hop sock will give you more beer at the end)
Finish boil with hopefully 10L left in pot, pull out and drain hop sock (if its less than 10L, top it up with boiling water from the kettle)
Put lid on pot and place it in Laundry sink full of water to chill wort down to your pitching temperature. Ice blocks in the sink for a lager or to speed things up.
Carefully siphon off clear wort into your fermentor (leaving about 0.5L or so of break material in the pot)
9.5L in Fermenter will give about 9L packaged

And 9L is a slab

Should be about 3.5hrs from start to finish and you get to watch telly for a good hour of it

Or you can dick about with extract to give yourself more volume - but it won't be AG.

So it depends what you actually want.

Thirsty

PS - if you are just up for trying things out with a minimum of trouble - a cotton pillow case looks a lot like a BIAB bag to me. It would be a lousy permanent bag, but for a small volume experiment?? Don't expect miracles of efficiency, but it certainly would be easy.

 

[shellnaf]

I finally made this the other day, it was DrSmurtos GA. Everything seemed to have gone OK, the final volume was just over 8L, I topped it up with a bit of water to around 9L. It took forever to do but I enjoyed the whole process anyway. Also forgot to take OG, then found my hydrometer in pieces in the dish rack shattered. I have one question though, it seemed to have fermented OK and came to almost a stop after 3-4 days, I took of the fermenter lid to have a smell and was hit with something like a gaseous odour, can't really describe the odour because as soon as I enhaled I had to whip my head back as it almost had a burning sensation. I was thinking maybe it had something to do with all that space in the fermenter being co2, seeing as there is only around 9L of wort. Haven't tasted it yet as I don't have a reason to take a sample without my hydrometer.

Thanks for all the help you guys have provided.
Nathan

P.S. also did the Nelson sauvin summer ale two days ago, that seemed to go a lot smoother than the 1st time.

EDIT: I can now see why they say once you do AG you don't want to go back to K&K.

 

[Mantis]

Good stuff. The stink in the fermenter was probably just CO2. I get the same when I stick my head in the fermenter chest freezer to try to get a whiff of whats coming out of the airlocks. Waste of time really cause the whole freezer would be full of CO2

 

[shellnaf]

I racked both of them to secondary tonight, had a little taste of both, tasted very good. So I'm guessing it was co2. Just need the equipment to do the larger batches now.

Nathan

 

[Thirsty Boy]

yep - just C02. It dissolves in the moisture inside your nose and turns into carbonic acid, thus the burning sensation.

Mantis - Careful with your head in that chest freezer, its amazing how fast you can pass out with your head in a low oxygen environment, and if you fall into the freezer when you do pass out, you die..... only semi joking

 

[shellnaf]

Yeah it certainly packed a punch, I felt a little spaced out for a few minutes after the big whiff and not a good spaced out eether. Must remember not to take the lid of fermenters and inhale.

Nathan

 

[MarkBastard]

Guys, I finally made this BIAB partial Amber Ale.

Ended up doing the following:

Batch Size: 20.00 L
Boil Size: 10.00 L
Boil Time: 60 min
Brewhouse Efficiency: 76.00

Ingredients

Amount Item Type % or IBU
1500.00 gm Pale Liquid Extract (8.0 SRM) Extract 45.05 %
1500.00 gm Pale Malt, Ale (Barrett Burston) (3.0 SRM) Grain 45.05 %
300.00 gm Caramunich II (Weyermann) (63.0 SRM) Grain 9.01 %
30.00 gm Chocolate Malt (450.0 SRM) Grain 0.90 %
38.00 gm Williamette [4.60 %] (45 min) Hops 19.8 IBU
19.00 gm Williamette [4.60 %] (5 min) Hops 2.1 IBU
1 Pkgs Safale US-05


I put exactly 10L of cold water in my pot and brought it to a strike temp of 69 degrees. I then took the pot off the stove and onto a towel on the kitchen bench, added the bag, and then poured the grain slowly into the bag which was sitting in the pot. I then gave it a bit of a mash for about one minute using a plastic big spatula thing. The water to grain ratio seemed high enough that nothing was clumping together. Everything seemed nice and wet and mixed in appropriately so I didn't think I needed to stir for very long. No more than two minutes I'd say. Measured temperature again after a stir, and it was 66 degrees. Perfect. So I put the lid on and wrapped in three towels. Set the timer for 60 minutes. After 15 minutes I checked and it was still 66 degrees, so I left it for the remainder of the mashing time. It ended up being 64 degrees at the end.

I then put it back on the stove and rose the temperature to 76 degrees, stirring at the same time (both inside and outside of the bag depending on what I felt like. I was using the 'still' style thermometer to stir to get a good reading). At this point I pulled the bag out and got the missus to give it a good squeeze. We squeezed it fairly well I thought without going overboard. I then dunked it in a stainless steel 'popcorn bowl' (best way to describe it). I had previously heated up 1.7L of water in the kettle to boiling and it hadn't cooled down enough, so I tipped some out and added some cold water. Ended up getting about 1.8L of about 72 degrees water and poured it over the grain bag that was sitting in the bowl. I then left it for a minute or two, and then dunked it up and down. Missus then squeezed the bag again. We got a decent amount of extra sugars out I believe. I chucked the bag in the sink and then poured the extra wort back into the main pot and brought it to a boil. At that point It was pretty straight forward. Used my little hop bag for the first addition. I wasn't too happy with it as I'd used a draw string to close it up completely which made it sort of float on the surface with some rehydrated hops sitting above water level. I pushed it down into the wort every now and then with a big spoon.

When it come time to do the final addition I could think of no way of adding more hops to the little bag so I cleaned out the big back and just used the corner of it to house the final hop addition. So just dunked the corner into the pot, put the lid on the pot, and then hung the excess bag over the lid of the pot so it didn't burn. Worked surprisingly well. I think next time I may reuse the big bag for all hop additions and not bother with the small one, OR I'll get a proper open hop sock.

So boiled away nicely. I got my first hot break (awww) and when I was done I added the liquid malt extract at flame out. It seemed to dissolve without much help.

I then transferred the put to the kitchen sink and ran the cold water tap just next to it so that the sink filled up at the same rate it drained out. After a while I saw satan forming in the wort, in the form of a big thunder cloud. Ahh! My first cold break! Nice. I can see why so many new brewers always ask the question 'what the f__ is forming in my wort' haha. Butters!

When it had cooled down a bit I transerred into the fermenter and topped up to 20L. Didn't bother trying to remove cold or hot break because I wasn't really sure how to and as I understand you don't really need to anyway. The 20L of wort ended up being 35 degrees celcius so I glad wrapped the top, chucked it in the fridge and was happy to see that my temp probe which is wedged between the fermenter and a block of foam showed 35 degrees, despite it previously showing 18 degrees in the fridge. This suggests to me that the probe on the outside of the fermenter, appropriately insulated, is a fairly accurate way to measure wort temperature.

Woke up this morning and took a gravity reading and pitched the yeast. The gravity (temp corrected) was 1.043. I messed around in beersmith with the house efficiency figure to make the estimated OG match up with the measured OG and that gave me an efficiency of 76%. I don't know if that's an accurate way to work it out or not. Can anyone inform me?

I was pretty happy with 1.043 either way. That's exactly what I wanted, keeping in mind I ended up cutting back to 1.5kg of base ale malt (I can't even remember why I did this, but I guess it made sense anyway).

Hoping I can get this to ferment down to 1.008 giving 4.5% abv, which is what I was trying to achieve.

All up it did take me a few hours but I had help by the missus the whole time, AND, I also put down TWO other brews in the same night. So I have three fermenting right now. That is simply awesome.

 

[kram]

Good work MB.

What you've done to calculate your efficiency sounds spot on. The only suggestion I have is to check you had the liquid malt as an 'after boil' addition in beersmith? If not, I think your estimated hop utilisation would be a bit low and it might be in the 25+ IBU range.

Save some of this one!

 

[MarkBastard]

Yep it was ticked as an add after boil. Beersmith has this 21.9 IBU. I reduced the amount of hops slightly because they were a higher AA than the ones we used last time for that all extract.

 

[smollocks]

I finally made this the other day, it was DrSmurtos GA. Everything seemed to have gone OK, the final volume was just over 8L, I topped it up with a bit of water to around 9L.

Hi shellnaf, would you mind posting your recipe and water volumes? I'm aiming to do a small AG BIAB of the same recipe in a 20L pot and would like to see your numbers.

Cheers