PistolPatch wrote:So, it's all happening Paudle . Congratulations . That must have been a long brew day but a sensible way to go given the kettle size . A second kettle and bag or a larger kettle will make life much easier. Hope all went smoothly enough though .

I just opened the first bottle yesterday night. It tastes great! Thanks for all your help

Thanks for the help Yeasty and PistolPatch!

My porter is now in the fermenter. Everything went pretty smoothly, only 1 small boil over early on. My OG matches the recipe so here's hoping it tastes good at the end.

Hello every one,

I'm trying to move to all grain to make less beer at a time. 20L is just too much of "1 beer". My LHBS is not so good and I have to by grain in 500G, 2KG or 25KG. so I'm trying to get a simple recipe going, using only a single grain.

So here is what my first try is going to be:
SMaSH APA:
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/smash-apa-87816/

I have a 19L steel enamel canning pot and I'm trying to scale to 2KG of grain. The diameter is about 33.5 CM. give or take 1CM

The bottom is domed about 2-3cm in the centre. I.e if I put only 1-2cm of water I get a doughnut shape ring of water. Is it worth manually calibrating the pot or are the values from "The calculator" good enough?

I included my attempts to fill out the forms.

Thank you

loonyscientist wrote:Hello every one,

I'm trying to move to all grain to make less beer at a time. 20L is just too much of "1 beer". My LHBS is not so good and I have to by grain in 500G, 2KG or 25KG. so I'm trying to get a simple recipe going, using only a single grain.

I'm going to assume the height of your kettle is about 22cm which with your diameter gives ~19.4L. If you want to use 2Kg of what I assume is 2-row you can make a 1.050 OG beer but it will be very close to the top of the kettle so maybe hold some water back if it looks like its going to overflow for the mash and just add some back for the boil or run hot water through the grain bag (see maxiBIAB) to get a bit better efficiency (shouldn't matter for this recipe).

Here's what I came up with for a brew length of 9L at 1.050 OG

Use your 2kg of grain and have 17.25 liters of strike water which will be about 17.6L once heated up to strike temp as water expands with a rise in temp. I'm going to assume you would like to mash at about 66C so your strike water should be about 68.3C but I would err on the lower end of that for a pale beer like this. Your thermometer is probably inaccurate any way so if you have 3 or so that would be best.
As far as the hops go we have an estimated 47IBU if you use .35oz
(10G) of a 9%aa hop for the 60 and then .5oz(15G) for the 20 and 5 minute addition.

If you want to mash with a little bit less water that would be fine since you would have the hot strike water at 20cm height and with the grain would bring it to about 22cm height which is very close. Once again you could add water back to the boil or pour mashout/sparge water through the grain prior to boil which would be a maxibiab.

The biab boils are 90 minutes and my calculator assumes about 5.6L of boil off leaving you with 11L at the end of the boil which would be about 12.4CM in your kettle. at ambient temp/ after chill if you do that it would appear to be 10.5L or 12Cm in your kettle. not a huge difference but you can see water does shrink as it comes to room temp. The calc assumes you will lose 1.5L to trub and this leaves you with 9L into the fermentation apparatus. Then you will lose some to siphoning and you should end up with 8.33L or so into packaging.

Hi All

Under duress i have to brew a fruit beer for the missus. It's also gonna be my first BIAB experience having moved from Extract with grains.

I plan on doing a wheat beer as a base and have just bought 1kg of pilsner 2 row and 1kg of wheat malt. I have calculated that this will make me a 2gal batch with a FG of 1048.

Could someone please tell me what volume of water to use in the mash and sparge processes?

And is it as simple as:

mash, sparge, boil (with hop additions), cool, pitch, ferment.

Cheers
Dave

cheers for that. So just mash in say 3gal of water, remove grain and continue through to the end?

I have a 33L pot Yeasty and yes it'll be stove top. I am still trying to get my head round the calculator

Cheers Todd

yeasty...... The diameter of my pan is 17" (45cm)

I think i am getting the hang of the calculator after having read the link you put up regarding the mini-biab. Would be good to check against yours though

This is what i end up with (see attached file)

22.84L of water seems alot for 2Kg of grain. I though a mash had to have the correct ratio?

Or am i reading it wrong?

ah right.......this is whats been confusing me. So the above calculation is probably correct? Mash in that volume at the correct temps and then brew on as per usual?

Cheers Yeasty. I get it now. I was getting too worked up on mash ratios i think. Time to stick to just this one forum and not loads of others

Cheers everyone. I'll let you know how it goes!

Sorry. One more question.

I am gonna add some pureed fruit to the Secondary FV as i said. Is there a formula for how fermentable fruit is and what it will do to the ABV? I want it fruity but not stupidly high alcohol, say no more than 7%

Nice one Bob, that's answered my question

Hello

Can someone help or show me what i am missing? Been staring at this for hours now and cant get my head round it!
I have attached 2 screenshots from the maxi-biab calculator.
The first one (of the Maxi-BIAB tab) shows as 30.62L whereas the Mash Volume is 42.97L in the 2nd screenshot (Volumes Tab)

Is this correct or am I missing something obvious?

Cheers
Dave

Hi Lylo

Thats what i thought at first but further up the 1st screenshot it says i do not have to do a pre-boil addition?