Mashing 4 pounds

I am mashing just over 4 pounds of grain. Will my 10 gallon mash tun be too big for this? It is the big round yellow water cooler with false bottom.

Maybe add a little more grains and just stop when u hit ure volume. I'm assuming ure doing a small batch

But that would raise my gravity

You can mash any amount you want, but there are some things to watch for.

#1 is temp control. The more head space you have, the more temp drop you'll see. You can compensate by wrapping the tun in towels or similar. You can also up your mash ratio so there is more volume.

#2 is dead space. Not much you an do about this, but you need to include it in your calculations. Losing a pint is a much bigger deal when you are talking about a 2 gallons vs 5 gallons.

nanofreak said:

But that would raise my gravity

Click to expand...

In a 10 gallon cooler I think 4 lbs of grain would drain very slowly because of the water level height so u should just add more grains and add water to lower ure gravity

for 4lbs just do BIAB, get 70% eff and be happy with it. I don't think for a batch that small that it would be worth the extra efforts otherwise.

I did 4lbs of 2-row to add to a batch I already had fermenting (forgot those 4lbs of base malt during the initial brewing). I did it in my 10g round cooler and it worked fine. I just preheated the cooler with a couple of gallons of boiling water for 10 minutes before starting my mash and my temps were stable for the whole 60 minutes. Just remember to adjust your strike water for a preheated mash tun. I had no lautering problem either, wort drained quickly and I had good efficiency @ 80%. Hope that helps!

There's a cool "can I mash it" calculator on Green Bay Rackers:

http://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml

As for "is it too big" - if you pre-heat your mash tun and avoid opening it, you should be fine.