A friend bought me a decommissioned keg for 30 bucks on Friday so I’m going to make a keggle this week and up my production to 10 gallon batches and still be able to brew outside. Life is good. Does anyone here use keggles for biab? I bought a bag for the grains just curious about starting volume of water.
Brewers Friend has a total recipe planner that has a BIAB option…I’m usually spot on with OG when I brew with one of my recipes with their software, water calcs, etc.
Thanks @ voodoo_donut. I have beersmith but hardly use it. Just needed a rough estimate of the amount of water. I start my 5 gallon batches with 7.75 gallons and end up with a little less than 6 in the fermenter so I was going to try starting with 13.5 with 19 lbs of grain and see where that gets me
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I guess I should add that I batch sparge with 170* 5.4 pH water, which for 5 gallon batches generally(highly variable depending on grain bill) is around 4.25 gallons versus 3.75 gallons in the BK for the mash. Generally you will double that for 10 gallons. For dunk sparge or no sparge obviously you’ll get different splits.
Basically what I do is mash with 10 or 5 if doing a 5 gallon and dunk sparge with whatever I need to make up the difference. Always get 85%
So pretty much just top off with a few gallons?
Yes . Some people pour over I dunk sparge in a bucket then ad that to the kettle
I just squeeze and drain. Hopefully it all fits in a 15.5 gallon keggle. I bought a pulley as well just trying to figure out where I can mount it outside to lift it up. A nice tall ladder would be nice but I don’t have one. Just lots of trees here in oregon.
I start my 10s with 12 gallons I have a 20 gallon pot. It’s going to be close in a 15 but doable. You could hold back a gallon or 2 of the sparged wort and add it towards the end after boiling off a bit
That’s an idea. What is a typical gravity of beer you make starting with 12 gallons?
If you’re getting a high extraction % you can go pretty big. I try to stay around 20# of grain which gets me around .060. You could go bigger if your pully set up can handle it. You could steep the specialty grain separate. I’m going to try a 15 gallon batch in my 20 but I’m going to do 2 separate mashes and then combine the wort. What kind of chiller do you have
I altered 2 of them in the past… The first one I cut the circle in the lid… The second one I followed the seam around the top… leaving the handles attached… That one I liked better… Easier to get the bag out. It seemed I could brew a 10 gallon batch of Duvel, but was pushing the limit… 22 pounds of malt… And like Brew Cat, I had to top up… I used a vigorous boil too, which determines how much liquid you’ll lose…
You’ll find out just what you can or can’t do by brewing… Start with a lower ABV recipe, find out what going on. Then start gravitating upwards… Sneezles61
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Just a standard one. Which one would you recommend?
I’ve used a 50’ immersion chiller which works fine not super fast but workable. Now I have a counter flow that I use only on the big batches and drain through a window to my basement and fermenters. I use it more for the ease of moving the product although it does chill faster also.
Yeh I’ve been thinking about getting a counterflow
I have both an immersion and CF. The CF is faster but much harder to clean and feel safe that it is clean. I always run some of the boiling wort through before turning on the water just in case.
If you end up with both, the IC can be used first to drive the down the temp before running through your CF.
I built a parallel counterflow chiller… 1/2" inside 3/4"… I’ve only 4 loops at 360*, and I can recirc 12 gallons of boiling wort to 68* in 16 minutes… Thinking to add a few more loops… I’ll be willing to bet I can get it down quicker and without recirc… Sneezles61
Yeh it would be nice to have it come out at the right temp right away. How do the big breweries do it?
Plate chiller… Big Commercial plate chiller… Sneezles61
