Going to try first partial mash, please check me

I'm going to be brewing my first partial mash recipe tomorrow, and I just wanted to make sure I've got all my ducks in a row here. I read the easy partial mash sticky and it was a huge help. Ok, so here's what I'm thinking:

- mash 2.5# of grain in 2 gallons of 160 degree water.
- rinse grains in 2 gallons of 175 degree water.
- combine the two pots, add extracts, and continue as usual.

Everything sound ok here? I apologize if my terminology is a bit lacking!

Oh, and I'm using an electric stove, so I can't do full boils. About 3 gallons or so is about the most I can boil. I figured some of the 4 gallons mentioned above would evaporate and leave me with something my stove can manage. Or should I do 1.5 gallons in each pot?

So, is your question about your recipe or if you should boil certain volumes at a time? Boil the most you can in general. If you have a really under powered nice then there are strategies to mitigate that, but it gets complicated.

--edit--

upon further reading, just boil it all at the same time. keep yer eye on it, and give it time to heat up. you'll be just fine.

Gtrman13 said:

I'm going to be brewing my first partial mash recipe tomorrow, and I just wanted to make sure I've got all my ducks in a row here. I read the easy partial mash sticky and it was a huge help. Ok, so here's what I'm thinking:

- mash 2.5# of grain in 2 gallons of 160 degree water.
- rinse grains in 2 gallons of 175 degree water.
- combine the two pots, add extracts, and continue as usual.

Everything sound ok here? I apologize if my terminology is a bit lacking!

Oh, and I'm using an electric stove, so I can't do full boils. About 3 gallons or so is about the most I can boil. I figured some of the 4 gallons mentioned above would evaporate and leave me with something my stove can manage. Or should I do 1.5 gallons in each pot?

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Your water volume is not correct, sorry to say. When you mash, you want to mash with 1.5 quarts of water per pound of grain. So, you want to stay at about 3.75 quarts of water for 2.5 pounds of grain. You could go as high as 5 quarts (2 quarts per pound) but that's it. Also, 160 is pretty hot. You want to mash the grains at 150-155, so make sure you check the temperature and stir well. You can add it to water that is 160, since the grains will bring down the temperature when you add them, if that's what you meant.

Rinse the grains in 170 degree water, not higher. You can go up to a 1/2 gallon per pound, so use only 1.5 gallons of water.

If you need more water for your boil volume, add water to the boil kettle. Don't use too much water in the mash (pH issues) or sparge (oversparging causes some tannin extraction).

Keep in mind that the grains will absorb quite a bit of water in the mash, so if you use 5 quarts for the mash, you'll only get out about 3.5 quarts. Add the sparge water to it, and you'll still be under 3 gallons. You should be fine with your pot.

Welcome to the wonderful world of partial mash! After seeing DB's easy PM tutorial I switched to partial mash on m third batch. I never looked back and have since moved on to stovetop AG small batches.

Yooper's advice is all great, as usual. Do you have a recipe picked out already? If not, whenever I picked a recipe for PM I would just pick an AG recipe from the data base and replace some of the base grain with extract. I'd generally aim for mashing 5 or 6 pounds, but if you wanted to start smaller that wouldn't be a bad idea. Just make sure you have at least as much base grain as non base grains in your mash.

Partial boils will work fine. I always did 3 gallon boils, and depending on how much grain I used, I would lose .5-1 gallon of wort to the grains, so plan accordingly.