One vessel, partial mash question

[wbyrd01]

In reading on techniques for mashing I've learned that I should mash with approx 1.25 quarts of water per pound of grains. Most of my recipes call for around 5lbs of grain (plus 3lbs of DME) so I would want to use about 5 quarts of water or so for my mash. I only have one vessel large enough to hold this much water and it happens to be my brew kettle which is the 36 quart Bayou Classic stainless turkey fryer. Until now I've just added my full boil volume to the pot, mashed BIAB style at the appropriate mash temp, removed my bag of grains, and continued to the boil portion of my brew. I've recently learned that I should probably be mashing with the appropriate amount of water rather than the full boil amount of water. My question is, is it ok to add room temperature water to the wort from my partial mash and then boil? Or should I find some way of keeping my wort at temperature while heating up the boil water? Eventually I will get a mash tun and HLT, but I'm not ready to do that just yet.

Thanks.

 

[twistr25]

Are you doing any kind of a sparge? I believe topping up to your boil volume with regular tap water should be just fine, but if you are sparging you would want it around 160 to run back through the grains.

 

[wbyrd01]

The only sparge I'm doing is dunk-sparge. But I don't know if I can still do that with the smaller amount of water. It's easy to do with 6 gallons of water though. I do have a one gallon stainless pot that I could use to heat water to rinse the grains with. I just don't know if one gallon would be enough.

 

[unionrdr]

I use 5lbs of grains & 3-3.3lbs of extract with my PM's too. I started upping the 1.5G mash water amount to an even 2 gallons. Def better wetting of the grains,not as thick as before. I ad the paint strainer bag to the heating mash water & when it gets to mash temp,I add the fine crushed grains. Stir that with my plastic 24" paddle (5G SSBK) till well wetted & no dough balls.
Then remove from heat,cover & wrap it up in my thinsulate lined winter hunting coat for the 1 hour mash. In the coarse of that hour,it'll gain 1 degree rather than loose 5 or more degrees. Works so much better than trying to manually control mash temps.
While it's mashing,I heat 1.5 gallons of water to 165F for the sparge. I think it's better to have sparged grain water going in with the mashed wort than plain water. I pull the grain bag out & put it in a SS collander on top of the BK/MT & let it drain well. Then sparge with the 1.5 gallons of water,giving 3.5 gallons of wort. Then proceed to boil as normal. I also had to (with aftermarket elec burners) cut the heat from "HI" down to "8.5" to keep from slowly burning out the sockets on the burners. I still get a good rolling boil,but not crazy rolling. Just smooth,even roll. I also don't loose some 1.5 gallons to boil off anymore.

 

[tre9er]

I don't see anything wrong with what you did previously with full volume mashes. Many people do all-grain BIAB that way, no sparge, full volume mash. Tannins don't come into play until the temp is much higher and the wort PH is lower than that of the mash. You'll get a little worse efficiency this way than doing a sparge, but a good stir and squeezing should still get much of the sugars out of the grain. Plus, it's easier than separate vessel for sparge water, taking the bag out, dunking in another pot, adding the two pots together, etc.

I realize you're partial mash, so if you're really worried about the water-to-grist ratio during the mash, you *could* heat a few gallons in a separate pot and then pour them in after the mash and you'd still be doing "no sparge".