All grain partial boil

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

tobrew

Well-Known Member
Joined
Nov 20, 2008
Messages
208
Reaction score
3
Location
Ashby Ma
Is it possable to do a partial boil using all grain? The problem I have is my well that use to chill full boils dryed up. So i was wondering if I mash and collect 3gallons of wort,boil,cool and than top off in the fermenter would it be ok? Any draw backs from doing this?
Mike
 
You should search brew in a bag (BIAB). That's probably what you will end up doing.
 
You would (if I understand the question) be doing a higher gravity brew, then diluting with water to reach whatever target gravity. You would have to adjust your hopping and whatnot and take all of that in account.

I personally can't stand not being able to do full boils. I would probably do as JJL suggests and BIAB.
 
I was just looking at the BIAB method. Think I will go that route until we get some rain..
Thanks
 
Partial boil all grain is very inefficient. You'd be better off doing a partial mash, then augmenting with some extract.
I think Bobby_M is right, but if you fly sparge, you may be able to get away with it.
For many years, I fly sparged with a 5g Rubbermaid cooler. With that setup, I always needed to collect a full boil volume from the sparge. A few years ago, I changed to a 10g Rubbermaid cooler. With this, I find that normally I need to stop the sparge before I have collected the full volume. For simplicity, I make up the volume prior to the boil, but it would certainly be possible to do a partial boil, and make up the volume post boil, without losing any efficiency.
With the 10g cooler, If I sparge for 40 minutes, I need to collect the full volume, but if I sparge for 90 minutes, I can stop the sparge at about 85% of the full volume with virtually no loss of efficiency.
This would indicate that I could do a partial boil with about 85% of the full boil volume. With a different MLT geometry, it may be possible to reduce this %age even further, and make a partial boil with AG possible with minimal efficiency loss.

-a.
 
Back
Top