Topping Up Partial With Water

[matt s]

Hi everyone,

I am a bit of a new brewer, but have done a lot of reading. I just wanted to run a quick question by you all to make sure what I am doing is okay.

So basically I want to do a partial BIAB. 3kg LME and 2.kg of ale malt and 300grams of light crystal malt.
The plan was to do a 12L mash with the 2.3kg of grain in my birko and then add an amount of LME to give me an OG of about 1.040 before doing my boil with the 12L. I would be adding the rest of the LME at the end of the boil.
Is it okay to top this up to 23L with clean water? I have done this sort of thing with pure extract, but never experimented with a few kg's of grain before.

Cheers and thanks,

Matt

 

[pat86]

Yep that would be fine. If you measure your SG after the boil, you can also figure out how much water to add exactly to hit your target gravity.

 

[slcmorro]

If you want to be an absolute purist, you could boil your top up water for a time to ensure it's 100% dinky di, but I'd just fill up from the tap and bang it in.

 

[verysupple]

What you have planned is fine.

What size is your Birko urn? If it's a 30 or 40 L one then why not add the extra water at the start of your boil? It's a bit more effort to calculate how much you need to add (need to know boil off etc.) but after a couple of brews you'll have it down pretty well.

I guess the advantage to not boiling the full volume is that it doesn't take any where near as long to chill down to pitching temp.

 

[matt s]

Thanks for the help everyone!

Verysupple: Yes, the fact that I don't have to chill nearly as much wort is the main reason I am doing it this way, this time. I plan to make a copper wort chiller sometime in the future. For now I think a 2L block of sanitised ice should do the trick while I am transferring to a fermenter, which will then go into an ice bath. My birko is 30L, so I will give it a go this way just while I am getting my head around the calculations.
Again, thanks for your time everyone!

 

[manticle]

How are you cooling the wort? If possible, I 'd be looking at full volume boil and chill/ no chill. Presumably birko has room. Why risk anything after all that effort?

 

[manticle]

^posted as you wrote that. I'd cube the lot and no chill or preboil and no-chill the top up water.

 

[porschemad911]

Go for it, works great for me!

I do small batch (10 litre) brews, with an 8 litre pre-boil volume in a 9.5 litre pot on my gas stove. To get the pre-boil volume I mash 2kg grain in 6 litres of water doing BIAB in a 10 litre Esky beverage cooler, then sparge with another 4 litres. I end up with about 4.5 litres post-boil (90 minutes) and chill in an ice-water bath. I top up to 10 litres in the fermenter with cold tap water and usually pitch my yeast into wort at about 17C.

The results so far? Absolutely delicious!

 

[BrosysBrews]

Thanks for the help everyone!

Verysupple: Yes, the fact that I don't have to chill nearly as much wort is the main reason I am doing it this way, this time. I plan to make a copper wort chiller sometime in the future. For now I think a 2L block of sanitised ice should do the trick while I am transferring to a fermenter, which will then go into an ice bath. My birko is 30L, so I will give it a go this way just while I am getting my head around the calculations.
Again, thanks for your time everyone!

Be brave I found BIAB easier then I thought it would be, use IanHs spreadsheet or similar and it is pretty straight forward to go close to full volume