Anyone make 2 gallons

Northern Brewer General
1

Was wondering if anyone doubles a 1 gallon recipe cooks it and adds it to a gallon of
water in a 3 gallon carboy to make 2 gallons. I don’t have the room to do 5 gallons
have been making 1 gallon kits lots of work for only 10 bottles of beer would like to get
2 gallons would be perfect …

2

Doubling up, tripling, halving is doable. Almost any recipe can be scaled up or down by keeping the ingredients in the same proportion as the original recipe.

3

I haven’t done two gallon batches this way (I have a pair of one gallon fermenters), but I have made some two gallon batches with just one gallon equipment (I have two fermenters).

You approach will work, but …

If you are putting the malt/hops from 2 one gallon kits into just 1 gallon of water, you will be boiling a concentrated wort - so you will likely want to adjust the amount of bittering hops.

This thread (“2.5 Gallon Kits?”) may also be of interest. Dividing 5 gallon kits (or recipes) into 3rds makes a lot of sense - but I haven’t given it a try quite yet.

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4

I’m still doing 1.7 gallons average. The last two batches were 1.3 and before that I did some 2-gallon batches. This seems like the right amount for me. Just double or divide all the ingredients and you can customize any recipe to give the amount that you prefer.

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5

In my opinion this is basically what the British did when shipping beer to India back in the day. Brew a strong bitter beer and ship it then add the water. Save on shipping and tax. Of course the crew was sneaking some during the voyage and may have added even more water.

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6

ha that’s a good one

7

I typically go the 3 gallon route.

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8

I’m another for 3-gallon batches.

Scaling down is hard for extract recipes. Scaling up is fine if you’re just making multiple kits at the same time. If you brew all grain, you can scale to any size you can safely boil.

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9

A pair of additional forum threads from 2013/2014:

edit: Here’s another:

edit (2): last one

  • Recipes for one gallon brews?. It’s not directly related to the current thread, but it does offer some ideas of what can be done when one is limited to gallon batches.