Water volume calculations for mini-mash

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craft_beer_fan

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Hello home brewers! My apologies if this has already been answered/posted.

I am fairly new to brewing (have done 4 extract brews) and have a question on calculating water volumes for doing a mini-mash. I got the book, "Clone Brews" and am going to try a mini-mash of the Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA. Surprisingly, even though the recipes are in the book, there are no details for how much water to use when doing the mini-mash method for either the mash or the sparge. I looked up some recipes and instructions on the web for partial mash kits and it looks like I should use the following calculations:

Mini-Mash
1 quart of water per pound of grains

Sparge Water
1.3 quarts of water per pound of grains

Does this seem correct? So, I calculated that since I have 3.5 lbs of grains that I need to use 3.5 quarts of water for the mash and 4.5 quarts for sparging. Does this seem like the right calculations when figuring water volume for mini-mash?

Thank you in advance and cheers! :mug:
 
When I was doing partial mash I settled on using about a gallon of water to mash. Something to consider, it always seemed to me like it was really easy to over sparge doing a partial mash. 4.5 quarts sounds about right to me, but keep a close eye on it. If you see clear water coming out of your grain bed, STOP your extracting tannins, and I've had to drink my own over sparged beer, yuck!

I have the same book and have brewed many recipes out of it, enjoy and good luck!!
 
estricklin said:
When I was doing partial mash I settled on using about a gallon of water to mash. Something to consider, it always seemed to me like it was really easy to over sparge doing a partial mash. 4.5 quarts sounds about right to me, but keep a close eye on it. If you see clear water coming out of your grain bed, STOP your extracting tannins, and I've had to drink my own over sparged beer, yuck!

I have the same book and have brewed many recipes out of it, enjoy and good luck!!

Thanks for the info and reply! I was surprised that the book didn't give any instructions or suggestions on water volumes. I appreciate it!
 
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