Partial Mash Sparging Funnel?

I'm looking to do an all-grain batch in a bag with one 5 gallon kettle.

I am able to fit enough grain and water to mash a five gallon batch (12 or 13 pounds of malt with a 1.25 water to grain ratio), however when I take the bag out I am unable to sparge or "tea bag" with anything, the bag flattens out and won't fit in my second five gallon kettle with enough water to tea bag

Instead, I was thinking that if I had a funnel that was big enough to house the grains and wide enough at the bottom to rest comfortably on top of my five gallon kettle, I could place the grains in the funnel and run sparge water through it to fill up my kettle to four gallons. After that I'd be off and running to my boil.
I think this could be a very good idea for those of us that have started with extract brews and want to jump straight into all-grain. The investment would be small ($20 or $30 for the funnel) and the efficiency would be a lot higher than tea bagging (I'm assuming).
Thoughts? Opinions? More importantly, has this been done before? and if so, is there a funnel I can buy like this so I don't have to make one?

That might work. The only thing I can think of like that are those "spaghetti pots" that have a colander/strainer as a liner of the big pot, and then you just pull that out to drain the spaghetti.

Or you could try doing a partial mash in your bottling bucket or something so you don't have to worry about overfilling your pot.

Since you usually start with 6.5 gallons of wort for a 5 gallon batch, I assume you're making a 2.5-3 gallon batch with a 5 gallon pot?

Right now I'm doing anywhere between 4 and 5 gallon batches. I'm working backwords from my OG and my efficiency isn't very consistent. I've got my boil off rate so I'll use my mighty math powers and overcompensate with extra sugar preboil, then water down my batch to get to my OG.

Couldn't find a big enough funnel but I ended up doing my first all grain on Sunday (something to distract me from the Bears/Packers game).
For my final (for now) system I ended up using my spigot bucket with two bags and two 5g kettles.

I mixed then split my grains equally into two 5g kettles. Mashed for an hour in the oven at 170 turned off (to keep the heat), then reheated to 170 during the last 10 minutes.

To sparge I took the bags out (36x18), put them in my 5g spigot bucket lifted off the bottom with a speghetti strainer to keep the spigot from clogging. I recirculated the mash wort until it ran clear(ish), then kept recirculating while adding 150 sparge water to run through the grains. I overshot my OG by .004 because I had a better efficiency than I calculated (66% instead of 60%) so the system must have worked better than I thought it would.

After that I was out of the gates running.
Thanks for the advice yooper on the bottling bucket. What are you using? Coolers I'm guessing. You've got a ton of posts so I assume you've got some pretty sophisticated equipment since you've been brewing for a while.

gregpio85 said:

Thanks for the advice yooper on the bottling bucket. What are you using? Coolers I'm guessing. You've got a ton of posts so I assume you've got some pretty sophisticated equipment since you've been brewing for a while.

Click to expand...

You don't even want to know! I have an all electric HERMS, indoors. But, like most brewers, I'm not 100% happy with it so one of my electrical engineer friends is working on pieces of it for me. so, it's literally ripped apart right now.

I brewed last week on this:
https://cdn.homebrewtalk.com/gallery/data/1/4189-DSCF0085-1.JPG

Not too high tech, huh?

I kept all my "old gear" so I can brew on the stovetop, out in the yard on a burner, and when my rig is put back together, on my all electric 10 gallon brew system.

I started with a pot and a bottling bucket, though. And you can see from your own experience that it works! My beer isn't any better on my new rig, but I have to say that it's easier on my body with no lifting!