Why 5 gallon batches?

I have the ability to brew all grain recipes. I also buy kits that make 5 gallon batches. this is great for most beers which i am sure will get drank and enjoyed by many. I was wondering if it is necessary to brew in five gallon batches. I want to do some experimenting and wondered if 2.5 or 3 gallon recipes work just as good as 5 gallon recipes. I use brew smith and can have it help with calculations. just wondered if the quality and taste of the beer would be as good. any feedback would be helpful.:fro:

Recipes are scalable, that means that they are great or ****ty regardless of the batch size. A TON of folks on here do 2.5 and even 1 gallon batches, both ag and extract.

A lot of folks, including myself, do experimental batches in 2.5 gallon...and even do it on our stove tops.

Most of my test beers are done as a smaller batch and then scaled upwards.

Why the hell would you think the quality would suffer for being a small batch?

I've medalled with some of my small batches.

The old Mr. Beer keg is great for fermenting 2.5 gallon experimental batches!

i second that. i live in a tiny apt with a super small kitchen. i've been doing all-grain 1 gallon batches on the stovetop... works out just great and i'm learning a lot. BUT.... next batch i do is gonna be 5 gallons for sure. it's the same amount of work really. i'm tired of sweating my balls off for 9 bottles of beer!

AlbuquerqueJoe said:

The old Mr. Beer keg is great for fermenting 2.5 gallon experimental batches!

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Yes it is!!!!!!

In fact a put a primer on AG stovetop brewing in the Mr Beer thread years ago.

Sounds like a great way to do an experiment and make a starter for the next 5-10 gal batch at the same time!

That's the beauty of brewing your own beer u can do whatever the hell u want and nobody but u can say its wrong. I have been wanting to do a mead but not realy sure if I like them so I'm planning on doing a 1 gal batch for fun

When I went to BIAB, I went to 2.5g batches (from 5g) and I'm very happy with the decision. I get to brew more often, and try a lot of different recipes while I'm still learning. I usually get sick of a beer after a case or so, 2.5g is my personal sweet spot.

I am a big fan of small batch brewing (2-3 gallons)..

I tried a small batch once and like a ******* I thought my boil-off would be cut in half as well. Whoops. I had like 1.5 gallons after the boil and not 2.5 gallons.

Thanks for all the great comments, I have did a little research on here and found many posts of this topic. will be trying this very soon. Thanks again.

I do 2.5 gallon batches so that I can brew on my stove, plus since I am relatively new at brewing it helps to be making 24 bottles of beer in case the recipe i am making isnt that great!

I normally do 5 gallon batches but I just recently bought 2 3 gallon BB from "Williams Brewing" for $25.00 or so. I brewed a imperial stout a month ago and it will be bottled some time soon and conditioned until the end of November for a wedding. I normally keg but I'm looking forward to bottling my smaller batches. I'm gonna do half batches on beers that im not sure that I would want 5 gallons of.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing smaller batches, as was noted everything scales nicely. I'd argue that five gallons became the "standard" because it's about the limit of what one person can reasonably move by hand. It's also about the limit of what people can make on a stove, most home stoves will boil easily about half that volume and it's easy to just double-up by topping off. I'm not sure you'd want to be boiling 3 gallons and topping off to 10 gallons, but topping off to 5 works well for people.

Two cases' worth of beer is a pretty good amount, too, enough to get you through to the next batch, not so much where if you screw up it's a huge waste.

But, absolutely nothing wrong with making less. The only real downside is that it's virtually the same amount of work for half the end product.

I actually make a recipe for BIG beers for 5 gallons, and when they are too big for my little 7 gal mash tun, I scale them down to a batch size that will fit in my tun. Worked beautifull to make 3.5 gallons of my Munich Barleywine SMaSH!

I bought a 5 gallon cooler AFTER I had been using a 10 gallon just for smaller experimental batches. So far I've only done one - single hop calypso IPA. But that brew went so easy because of the size it was awesome. AND the brew came out good, so I'm now gonna bump it up.

Another reason for 5 gallon batches is that what will fit in a corney keg.

Yeah, I'd say 5 gallons became the "standard" based largely on equipment. Carboys beyond the 6.5 gallon capacity are difficult to find, expensive, and would be *HEAVY* as hell. 6-7 gallon buckets are mainstream for all sorts of applications. Brew pots get progressively more expensive as the size increases.

That said, there's nothing wrong with smaller (or larger) batches. I brew 10 gallons because it's basically the same work as 5 gallons (especially since I keg), and if I'm going to do all the work, I want more product at the end of the day. But I'd definitely consider scaling back if I wanted a truly experimental recipe that I wasn't sure about. And I scale back to 8 gallons or so if I'm brewing high-gravity beyond the capacity of my mash tun.

2.5 gallons (or even 1 gallon) give you the ability to experiment with recipes without having to make [and drink if they're bad] a bigger quantity. Of course, the downside to that is that if you LOVE the beer, you only have 2.5 gallons of it ;-)

i do 2-3gallon batches myself...turnover rate is quick from one recipe to the next. so im not stuck drinking the same beer all the time.

One of my favorite brews i did was a 2 gallon yeast harvester oatmeal rye stout that i used a collaboration of extra grain in. 2 gallons didnt go very far but i did learn that it was a great beer.