Hey everyone,
Having brewed from extract on a kitchen stove for 4 years now, I’m eager to make the jump to brewing larger batches from all-grain. I generally know what sort of gear I need, but I’m getting hung up on how much capacity I should plan for.
I’m teaming up and splitting the gear cost with three other friends, one of whom also brews (extract and BIAB), all of whom like beer. So I’m assuming that at least some of the time we’ll be splitting batches four ways or more. I’d really like to end up with more than six or twelve bottles for myself at the end of a batch, especially because I keg (the rest of the guys do not). I’d also like to plan ahead for future brewing – this gear is a significant purchase and I don’t want to have to replace it in a year or two because we’ve decided the batches we’re making aren’t big enough.
So with that in mind, I’m stuck between choosing a 15-gallon kettle and a 20-gallon kettle. I figure that we can reliably make a 10-gallon batch in a 15-gallon kettle and a 15-gallon batch in a 20-gallon kettle, accounting for boil-off, trub, etc, right? Or is it realistic to pull off batches closer to the capacity of the actual kettle?
Somewhat complicating things is that we’ve already bought some gear secondhand from another friend who moved across the country, so we have a 10 gallon Rubbermaid cooler, previously used as a mash tun. We want to be able to put it to use, but if we’re doing larger batches, will it be useful for anything? Maybe a HLT to hold sparge water, but not a mash tun, right?
I guess my other questions are:
•Is it insane to leap from extract brewing directly to brewing in a 20-gallon kettle?
•How big of a mash tun do we need to make a 10-gallon batch with a gravity of ~1.060? How big of a mash tun would be we need for a 15-gallon batch of same beer?
•Am I correct in thinking that we can make high-gravity batches with the same equipment provided we just make a smaller batch?
•How small of a batch can you actually make with a 20-gallon kettle? If one of the other guys wants to do a 5-gallon batch, is it merely overkill to use a kettle that size, or will it adversely affect the quality of the brew?
•For either of these capacities, will a 10-gallon cooler suffice for an HLT?
Like I said, I’m excited to get started and I feel like summer will have come and gone before I know it, so I’m anxious to start getting the equipment I need… but I don’t want to buy all the gear only to realize that I made the wrong choices. Any help or advice is most appreciated!
Thanks!