biab maximizing volume?

[Maegnar]

Hello, fellow brewers.

Only a few days before I start brewing my first all grain. I've decided to go with a BIAB method and here's what I've got:

4.75 gal pot (sadly it's the largest pot I've found)
8.8 lbs of base malt
4.4 lbs of caramel malt (I don't know exact names of malts, since that was a gift)
Challenger hops + Nottingham yeast.

I've tried playing around with this calculator, but having too little knowledge on the topic - it didn't help.
Now the problem is that I'm a greedy bastard. And I'd like to know how can I maximize the amount of final product with this setup? How about boiling water in another pot and adding it to the wort after I take out the mash? Or splitting the malt between two pots? Something other I cannot think about?

Any ideas are welcome

 

[dantheman13]

Hello, fellow brewers.

Only a few days before I start brewing my first all grain. I've decided to go with a BIAB method and here's what I've got:

4.75 gal pot (sadly it's the largest pot I've found)
8.8 lbs of base malt
4.4 lbs of caramel malt (I don't know exact names of malts, since that was a gift)
Challenger hops + Nottingham yeast.

I've tried playing around with this calculator, but having too little knowledge on the topic - it didn't help.
Now the problem is that I'm a greedy bastard. And I'd like to know how can I maximize the amount of final product with this setup? How about boiling water in another pot and adding it to the wort after I take out the mash? Or splitting the malt between two pots? Something other I cannot think about?

Any ideas are welcome

A lot of BIAB'ers do sparges, which would increase your volume. I used to use a 5 gallon pot to do BIAB. The problem was that there just wasn't enough room to fit the grains of a high gravity beer... and I was only doing 3 gallon batches. I would say to try doing the split pot idea. With two 4.75 gallon pots, you should be able to do 5 gallon batches. You'll probably have to boil in the two separate pots as well, and recombine them in the fermenter.

 

[friartuck]

How big of a batch are you aiming for with that much grain? Is this a standard 5.5 gallon batch?

With that pot, assuming you want to do a full boil, you may need to do 2 2.75 gallon batches, which would work ok in that pot. You could get away with boiling a concentrate and then topping off with cool pre-boiled water once in your fermenter, beer-kit style.

 

[Maegnar]

It's not like I must use all my grain at the same time. I could use 50-75% of it, for example, and leave the rest for next time. Thou getting only ~3 gallons of beer per brewday seems a bit too little.
So if no other ideas come up in here - I'll probably go with splitting.

And about that concentrate... I suppose the aim would be to boil for ~5 hours?

 

[friartuck]

Nope, your boil time would remain the same. The only thing that would really be affected is your hop utilization, and even that is up for debate.

You could do your mash, top up to ~4 gallons in your kettle (leaving room for expansion, etc). Do your boil, add to your fermenter and top off with cool pre-boiled water to get your full batch. You may even get away without needing a chiller if you use cold water to top-off the fermenter.

 

[FRS]

I do BIAB with a 5 gallon pot, so far I've confined myself to partial mashes. I find about 7 lb of grain with 3-3.5 gal of water works pretty well. You can then rinse the grains with a gallon of water or so and start your boil. I typically add 3-4 lb of liquid malt extract at the end of the boil and top up to 5 or 6 gallons to hit 1.055-1.065 or so.

If you step back to a 2.5 gallon batch it is possible to make lighter all grain beers this way as well... I just bought a 3 gallon better bottle to do just that.

 

[bob3000]

you could make a stronger wort and top up with a bit of boiled water. I have used a 12l pot to make 15l of beer this way. worked OK but was a little thin.

 

[Maegnar]

So as far as I can understand - there's two options here for me:
1) make two separate batches of 2.75 gal with 6.6 lb of malt each, then mix them up in fermenter.
2) make one batch of ~2.2 gal wit 13.2 lb of malt, then rinse it with additional gal and then top it up in fermenter.

I suppose I should get a slightly different results with these two methods. The first one should yield a higher OG and the second one - lower, correct?