Grains soaking up water

mew · 03-16-2007, 06:15 AM

I'm going to be doing my first all grain batch tomorrow, but I'm finding it difficult to calculate my sparge water and such without knowing how much water the grain will soak up. I know y'all will scoff, but I'm just doing a 2.12 gal batch (8 L) because I only have the capacity to boil 4 gallons. I'm already bored with extract brewing after two batches. I'll heat my strike water on the stove-top, dough in, adjust heat to saccharification temp., then put the pot in a pre-heated oven for an hour. I'm going to batch sparge using the bucket-in-a-bucket method with about 5.25 lbs of total grain. How much sparge water do you think I'll need? Thanks.

**Orfy** · 03-16-2007, 06:25 AM

I work on around 1L/kg
so that's around 0.5qt/lb

But what you should do is work out your mash water on around 1.25qt/lb.
Drain off your first running and see how much more you need. That will then tell you how much sparge water you need.

So heat the amount required for mashing. Then refill your HLT with its full capacity for heating up the sparge water. Better to have too much than too little.

There are calculators on promash and beersmith. Both free trial downloads and there's info on www.hottobrew.com

cha ngo · 03-16-2007, 06:25 AM

5.25*.125=.65
You will need 2.77 gallons,

mew · 03-16-2007, 06:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by orfy

But what you should do is work out your mash water on around 1.25qt/lb. Drain off your first running and see how much more you need. That will then tell you how much sparge water you need.

That seems like a sound method. Cool.

**Orfy** · 03-16-2007, 06:36 AM

It differs on every seystem so the calculations will give you a guide but the first session is where you learn the figures for your setup.

Based on my rough .5qt/lbs a guess would be
2.75 qts soaked up.
So mash with 5.25*1.25qts = 6.5 qts mash
6.5 - 2.75 = 3.75 qts first runnings.

If you have the capacity to boil 4 gallons why aren't you doing a 4 gallon batch?
If the pot is 4 gallom max then I'd still look at doing at least a 3 gallon brew.

mew · 03-16-2007, 06:52 AM

I was thinking that if a normal five gallon batch collects 7.5 gal of wort, the max I could collect doing 4 gal boils is 2.67 gal. Is this not right?

The pot is a five-gallon pot.

**Orfy** · 03-16-2007, 07:08 AM

You can get away with doing a boil with a loss of 10%/hour.
That's more or less a minimum, so go up to 20%/hour.

If you are careful then you should get a 4 gallon boil going in a 5 gallon pot.
So if you start with 4 gallon then you'll end up with around 3.5 gallon wort.
If you use a hop bag then you'll be able to transfer more or less the full amount to fermenter.

People doing lager boils normally boil a bit more agressivly and have some dead space in the kettle and leave hop material and cold break behind.

But like I say. the first time is an experiment/test

mew · 03-16-2007, 07:18 AM

I was under the impression that collecting only 4 gal of wort would shoot my efficiency to heck. If that is not the case, I might as well do a 3.5 gal batch.

**Orfy** · 03-16-2007, 07:33 AM

Work on an efficiencey of 70% for your first brew.

Use www.recipator.com to work out what grain you need for the volume.

Very roughly you'll get around 1036-1040 per lbs/gallon from base malt.

So.....

lets work on dead easy set of figures...

A preboil wort of 1040 and you want to 4 gallon
so that should be
4 Lbs of grain at 40points per pound = 160 gravity points / 4 gallon = 40 gravity points or 1040.
if you have 4 gallon 160 thats 1040
But if you reduce the 160 gravity points to 3.5 gallon
Thats a gravity of 160/3.5 45 or 1045.

But that's working on one 100% effieciency.

At 70% you'll get maybe 25 points per pound based on 1036 from the malt.
So. you'd need 6.5lbs of grain to get the same. (160/25)

I hope that makes sense.

If not just let recipitator/beersmith or promash do it for you.

casebrew · 03-16-2007, 03:57 PM

Thrift stores sell pots. Just boil in two pots and do a 5 gallon batch. Or maybe next batch, after you get some practise? Just don't use an enameled pot with chips that expose rust/iron to the wort.