I’m going from making 5 gallon batches to 10 gallon batches. I purchased a custom Spike 20 gallon kettle. My concern is that my current mash tun will no longer be sufficient as it is only a 10 gallon vessel, especially when brewing big beers. For those of you that have made this leap what did you use/purchase for your mash tun?
Upgrading to 20 gal kettle/10 gal batches
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Maths it out. What is that a 45L mash tun? So realistically you'll get a maximum of 18kg of grain in there. If your efficiency is 80% you'll recover about 4,320 points from a grist with an average of 300LoD. You said you want 10 gallon batches (in FV?) and you've room to concentrate the wort through evaporation and put in extra for losses to trub, hops and chilling, so call you post boil volume 50L. So you should be able to produce 50L at 1.0864. If you need a higher starting gravity you'll want sugar, extract, reduced volumes, double or split mash, the usual really. I've a 36L mash tun and do 50-60L batches with the aim of getting two kegs off FV allowing for losses. Rarely do I need 60L, 50-55L is usually plenty. I get 85% efficiency nearly all of the time and typically need to add something or do something to get that full volume at more than 1.068. I'd weigh it up. Bigger mash tuns take up space, cost money, are more awkward to handle and clean and so on. Size it for what you typically brew and find solutions for the rare times you want to push it.
postalbunny
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You should be fine for up to 1.050-60ish beers... the mash tun size has more to do with how much grain (OG and batch size) and the grain to water ratio. The Green Bay Rackers has a neat calc that can help you figure out if "you can mash it", plugin your grain weight and water ratio to see if it'll fit in the 10g tun. Then you can decide if you need a bigger tun or not.
https://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml
https://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml
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