All grain with partial boil possible?

[John8251]

I've searched for something that was related and I've come accross a few that are somewhat similar, but not quite exactly. SO, this is what I was thinking of doing. I've got an all grain recipe that calls for 8.25 lbs of grain and a large bag to do mash in a BIAB type fashion. I was thinking of mashing my grain in the bag with about 2.5 gallons of water for about 75 minutes, then doing a mashout. Then, I was going to lift the bag out of the water, place it on a sanatized collander and let itdrain into the kettle (which is 6gallons, being the reason im asking about this) followed by a sparge of about 2.5 gallons of hot water. I figured this would probably yield around the 4.5 gallonish area of wort for the boil. Is there a problem with continuing with the boil at that volume and then adding around the gallon or so to bring up the batch to 5 gallons in the fermenter? Or would this adversely affect my efficiency even after the mashout and 2.5 gallon sparge? I haven't been able to really find anything about how doing a partial volume boil vs a full volume would adversely affect efficiency. If this a bad idea, just let me know and I'll try to get my hands on a bigger kettle before this weekend. I was just trying to avoid having to fork $100+ for the bigger kettle, but would still love to get into all grain.

 

[tre9er]

Do you have a bucket fermenter? Mash with as much water as you can in your pot, safely, then pull the bag, place into bucket, pour sparge water in, stir, pull, squeeze, add wort to kettle and boil some off, then add more, etc. Unless you're mashing a lot of pilsner, DMS shouldn't be a concern. When are your first hop additions? If they're later you should be fine. Earlier, might have to increase the hops a bit due to lower volume leading to lesser utilization.

This isn't ideal, but there's no other way around boiling down to 5g in a 6g pot. You could grab a cheap turkey fryer and you'd be golden then.

 

[kitchenbeer]

You'll want all the wort boiled. It can be In one pot all at once. You could boil some, add in wort after some boil-off then start you hop schedule. Use multiple pots and combine.
The only way to have enough sugar to do a partial boil is to mash as much as you can and add extract make up the gravity of your top-up water.

 

[Saprobic]

When I started BIAB I was using an under sized pot and batch boiled my wort. There is a term for this that is escaping me at the moment but definitely boil all the wort. I actually got some incredible flavors from the batch boiling.