Top-off Water/Batch Size Question

So in typical male fashion I thought my equipment was bigger than it actually is. I picked up the ingredients for a 10gal batch, and only have a 30qt pot. Problem is theres a bunch of specialty grains and they're mixed together and already milled. With boiloff I'm looking at somewhere around 4 gallons if top-off water, which means I have 3 options:
1) Just make what I can and top off
2) Shake the heck out of the grains, hope they all mix up relatively evenly and make two 5 gallon batches
3) Do two separate boils, one for the specialty grains and one for the DME, and either split the hops evenly or just boil the hops with the DME as that's the larger volume.

I really don't know what the best option is and looking for some advice from some more experienced brewers on the best way to proceed and fix my mistake.

I would boil as much as you can then top off with water. Thats the only practical thing to do in which you can control as many variables. I have boiled 6 gallons of wort and split that batch into two 4 gallon batches after topping off with water.

cm_laflamme said:

So in typical male fashion I thought my equipment was bigger than it actually is.

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Post of the day!!!

cm_laflamme said:

So in typical male fashion I thought my equipment was bigger than it actually is.

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Speak for yourself, buddy. LOL

I would boil all you can and top off, just like a typical extract recipe you boil half the volume and top off the concentrated wort. so starting with a 7.5g boil should net you about 5g finished boil top with 5 gal clean water aerate and pitch just like you would with extract kits. Mind you i don't have the equipment to do full boils to begin with so don't know if the extract recipes scale up.

Are you doing extract? If you are doing extract you can just steep all the grains add you malt boil then split the batches and top off with how much water you need. Most beer kits only say to boil two gallons of water then top off.

If your talking all grain you can separate your wort out of the mash tun and do two boils

Dirty25 said:

Are you doing extract? If you are doing extract you can just steep all the grains add you malt boil then split the batches and top off with how much water you need. Most beer kits only say to boil two gallons of water then top off.

If your talking all grain you can separate your wort out of the mash tun and do two boils

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It's extract with specialty grains. My concern was whether having 2 gallons (give or take) of top off water per fermenter was going to be an issue.

kenstogie said:

Speak for yourself, buddy. LOL

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So you're saying every time you have to measure something by eyeball it doesn't wind up about an inch and a half short? Maybe it's just me then.

cm_laflamme said:

It's extract with specialty grains. My concern was whether having 2 gallons (give or take) of top off water per fermenter was going to be an issue.

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I've done this and had no problem. You might want to boil the water first to make sure it doesn't have any nasty bugs in it.