How small ia too small for a boil size?

[durbo]

I'm making the switch to partial mash from the "just add water kits" because they are terrible. My problem is the largest kettle I have access to is 8L (just over 2 gal). Is this too small to do a decent sized batch with steeping grains? If not what procedure (volumes of water etc) would you suggest in order to successfully brew a 5 gal batch? Cheers

 

[GilSwillBasementBrews]

Depends on your grain bill I like to shoot for 1. to 1.5 Quarts of water For Pound of grain when I Mash so going by those standards you could figure out how much water your pot can hold Plus Grains will take up volume as well so if I was going to mash 10 pounds of grain i'd need 15 quarts of strike water =3.75gallons so I couldn't do a 10Pound mash in your pot. but a pound or two you could. You could always mash thicker too some ive read mash at 1 to .75 qts/Lb as long as its not too thick to drain the water and you sparge sufficiently enough to rinse all the sugars I think as long as you keep a reasonable ratio of water/grain theres no reason you couldn't mash in anysize pot since in the end if your gravity is low just adjust with a little more extract in the boil.

 

[jCOSbrew]

You should be able to find a cheap 20qt kettle for $20-30 or you could use 2 smaller kettles. If you are limited to your current pot you could still steep specialty grains and add LME or DME.

 

[Cyclman]

Watch homebrewfinds for deals, they had a 10G kettle the other day for < $40.

 

[BrewerBear]

I would recommend getting something bigger to brew in to save you some of the hassle.I used a turkey fryer for a ton of batches until I bought a bigger brew pot.

 

[JDGator]

I grabbed at 4gal ss pot here in Canada for $30 so i'm sure you can find something down there for a better price. It's perfect for doing partial extract kits.

I plan to do BIAB this summer so i'll be looking for a 10gal or better myself!

 

[YeastHerder]

Re the OP question:

The BeerSmith default value is 1.25 qts water per 1 lb of grain in the mash. I mash 5 lbs of grain in a 3.25gal pot to do partial mashes, so using that to scale down I would expect that you can do a partial mash of up to 3 lbs grain combined with 3.75qts of water in your existing pot.

When you pull the grain bag out of the pot, squeeze it like it owes you money to get the extra wort out and you'll still lose at least 0.1gal water / 1 lb grain. My guess is you'll then have less than 3.5 qts of wort in your pot.

Assuming you have 8 qts - 3.5 qts = 4.5 qts of capacity left in your pot and this limits your sparge water volume. You can either do one sparge of 4.5 qts or two sparges of 2.25 qts each. There are an infinite number of additional variations you could do on how to split the sparge volumes. Let the sizes of your other pots decide this for you (at least for now).

After each sparge, squeeze that grain bag again and combine all the wort and sparged water volumes into your original pot. You should be near the limit for what the pot can hold. I recommend your total volume be at least 1 inch below the actual rim of the pot so you at least have a 1-2 second window to react for any potential boil-overs.

If you plan to augment this with DME or LME, you'll need to plan for those volume additions as well so you don't overflow your pot. In my setup, I have to augment with about 1 lb of DME to achieve a final OG in the 1.050 range for a 5 gallon batch.

Lastly, don't trust the advertised volume on your pot. Measure out water into the pot to find out what the real capacity is. Take a wooden spoon and stand it in the pot and notch it at different volumes as you are filling so you can get quick estimates on the volume in your pot as you try this for the first time using the spoon as your 'yardstick'.