Mash and boil in one kettle?

So, I am sure this has been done before so, if there is an article out there, please let me know!

By the way, I got a 3rd for my Belgian Witbier and 3rd for my Dry Stout at the Homebrew Competiton in Chico, Ca this last weekend! Not bad for my first attempt at each of those brews and my 6th and 7th batch total!

I have almost finished my Keg conversion and funds are low to buy the Mash Tun so I have been thinking a bit....Why can't the mash and boil be done in the same vessel? I read the sticky on the partial mash procedure. I want to do something similar but on a larger scale and not using any extract.

The idea I have is to mash the grain in a grain bag in my 15 gal kettle. After the mash, make something that can stand on the keg and suspend the bag over the keg so it can drip back into the wort. Then sparge the grain slowly with my fresh water from my HLT (my old 5 gallong pot). I would like to be able to do a 10 gallon batch.

Can this be done? Will the efficiancy be too low because of the grain being in the open air and cooling down even though I will be sparging with the hot water?

Thanks for any insight! I am sure someone else has tried something like this before.

If you search for "brew in a bag" or BIAB, you can find more information on a technique like this. You can find links to an Australian homebrew site where they talk about this. Hope this helps!

Yes, it can be done. You basically just described the "Brew in a Bag" technique.

It's especially popular in Australia, but it's been making some inroads in America recently.

The Brewing Network - How to go from Extract to AG for < $10.00

The Australian "brew in a bag" method was featured in the last issue of BYO as well.

You will probably find this thread very useful.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/easy-stovetop-all-grain-brewing-pics-90132/

nopride said:

If you search for "brew in a bag" or BIAB, you can find more information on a technique like this. You can find links to an Australian homebrew site where they talk about this. Hope this helps!

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Awesome! I knew I wasn't the only person doing this!

I have done it a few times. It works fine. it is a little hard to hold the bag up so you need to address that issue before you start. a really big colander might do the job.

I always wanted to take it a step forward and ferment in the keggle. I have not gotten around to trying this yet.

It is also easy to grab an old cooler and put a bag in it. That is how i am doing it now.

I always wanted to take it a step forward and ferment in the keggle. I have not gotten around to trying this yet.

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Now that's a little too far!

Thanks for the responses.

So, the Australian method show using all the water you are going to use for the mash and just draining te bag.

The other link I saw shows dunking the drained bag into another pot of water. I think this will be a little beter of a method because it will be collecting the sugars in the grain.

What about suspending the bag over the kettle and fly sparging?

avwfreak said:

Now that's a little too far!

Thanks for the responses.

So, the Australian method show using all the water you are going to use for the mash and just draining te bag.

The other link I saw shows dunking the drained bag into another pot of water. I think this will be a little beter of a method because it will be collecting the sugars in the grain.

What about suspending the bag over the kettle and fly sparging?

Click to expand...

The Aussie method lets you crush the grain finer than usual because there's no worry about a stuck sparge. They're getting over 80% efficiency, so I'm not sure it's worth messing with it much--keeping it simple is a large part of the point of doing BiaB.

They _do_ set the bag in a bucket for a while while they're bringing things up to boil to let it drain some more (or suspend it over one), and then dump that liquid into the boil.