Hopped UP Harvest IPA

Hey this will be the first "partial"mash recipe i will do. I just harvested about two ounces of Cascades from my first year cascade plant. ive been craving a really good IPA so this is what i came up with.

4 lbs. Ultralight LME
5 lbs. Domestic 2-Row
1.5 lbs. Crystal Malt 40L
.5 lb. Cara-Pils
.5 lb. Melanoidin Malt
1 oz Chinook(60min)
2 oz Cascade(20 min)
1 oz Cascade (5min)
white labs california ale
dry hop with 2 oz of homegrown cascade in secondary
should be around 6.7% abv with 64 IBUs SRM is 14

so considering i have 7.5 lbs of grain how much water should i use for the mash? im looking for a 3 gal boil volume for a 5 gallon batch. any suggestions?

Well, if you're doing a regular 1.25 qt/lb then you would mash in with 2.34 gallons. You can also use the general grain absortion of .12 gallons/lb giving you about a gallon of water lost to grain absorption. That means 1.34 gallons from the first runnings.

Sparge depends on your boil off rate. I have a very high boil off rate. So my preboil volume is 7 gallons. I think most people get away with 1.5 or so gallons per hour. We'll go with 1.5 for this example. So take your preboil volume and subtract your first runnings from it. (6.5 - 1.34 = 5.16) So sparge with 5.16 gallons of water. You shouldn't get any grain absorption when you sparge because they're already soaked, so you just get back out what you put in.

That should get you in the ballpark ... i think.

****, just realized this wasn't all grain. ****.

well, if you ever decide to do a full boil all grain batch, you can come back to this thread.

i should have mentioned that i have a 22qt kettle so i dont think i can sparge with that much water.