Required Equipment

Hey guys,

Real quick question. I picked up a mash tun from a friend for really cheap, so I'm looking into getting into AG brewing. The question I have is I only have a 7.5 gallon kettle. Will this end up being sufficient or will I need to invest in a larger pot?

That pot will work fine for 5 to 5.5 gallon batches with a 60 minute boil. If you want to do bigger batches or longer boils you will need a bigger pot.

Edit - This is assuming your doing full boils. There are methods of doing smaller volume boils and then topping up in the fermentor.

I would get a min 9.5 gallon pot. I usually get 7 gal of wort before then boil starts for a 5.5 gallon batch. I do longer boils.
Also get a chiller and outside burner.

That's big enough, but hit break might be tricky. A second pot also isn't necessary, but can be helpful depending on how you sparge.

When I started ag brewing I used the 7.5 gallon kettle that came with my turkey fryer. I brewed with it for years, over 5 years. it can be done. You need to figure out the boil off rate of your burner. If you have a gallon boiloff in 60 minutes, then your pre-boil volume for your batches would then be 6 gallons...so yeah you have room for it in the 7.5 gallon. I usually aim for 6.5 gallons pre boil.

Also you can do really almost to the lip of the kettle if you need to if you used a product like Fermcap s....which I used all the time I used the kettle. It prevents boil overs.

it should work but you may want to get another pot for the runnings to go into since ur gonna need to use ur BK to heat strike water.

I've also heard of and see alot of people just use a stardard fermenting bucket and then dump all the runnings back into their BK and go that route.

Awesome. Thanks for the feedback guys.

I have used a 7.5 gallon pot (a cheap Proctor-Silex SS kettle I paid $40 for delivered) since I started brewing over 5 years ago. It worked fine for extract, and made the transition to AG without a hitch. I routinely do 6.5 gal. boils in it....the secret is 5-6 drops of Fermcap-S (available from fine homebrew suppliers everywhere), and boilovers are no worries. Yeah, if I went to larger batches I'd get a bigger pot, probably a Brewhemoth. But that's not yet, maybe not ever. As the brewmaster of a local micro said to me once: "You'll learn a lot more from brewing 100 5 gallon batches than you will from brewing 50 10 gallon batches."

I do 6.5 gallon boils all the time in my 7.5 gallon pot. I've only had it boil over once, but I watch my kettle like a hawk, and stir constantly and adjust the flame a lot if it looks like it will boil over. I just bought some fermcap so that should make it even easier in the future to avoid boil-overs. I am, however, getting ready to upgrade to a 10 gallon kettle to give me a little more wiggle room.

If you have the money a larger pot is certainly a good investment, but if not the 7.5 gallon kettle will certainly suffice until you can upgrade later.