Why always five gallons?

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BigBlueBrad

BigBlueBrad

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I see that the least everyone makes is five gallons. Many have only a five gallon pot and brew three gallons of water and add 2+ of plain water to bring it to five gallons. Adding the water makes the beer not taste the same as when brewed all together.

Why not do a three gallon brew and brew the entire thing and not add plain water at the end? This still yields about 30 or so bottles of beer and it tastes better.

Thoughts?
 
5 gallons because it's a reasonable maximum amount to handle without advanced equipment (for me at least) and we have buckets and carboys sized for it. It takes the same amount of time to do a 5gal batch vs a smaller batch, so why not make more beer?

I often do 4 gallon batches in 5gal carboys, esp for higher grav beers I may not want the extra 10ish bottles of. Sometimes I do it for IPAs so I can save a little on hops and also drink them before they age too much. I've done a few 2.5 gallon batches. I've split a few between 1gal bottles too.

5gal is 'standard', but do whatever you want, there's no real rule to it.
 
sure. many people do that, but the main reason people brew more is it takes marginally longer to brew more. 3 gallons takes 3.5 hours, 5 gallons takes 4-4.5 hours, and 12 takes 5 hours, for example. 3g for 3.5 hours, 12 gallons for 5 hours. depends on what you want to do, your capacity, and your available time
 
Awesome. I was telling my wife how I wanted to get a bigger brew pot and she said until you do, just brew a batch your pot can hold. A smart wife rules.
 
When I started going all-grain I only had the ability to do half batches (2.5 gallons). I also liked the ability to try different beers soon. I thought also going 2.5 gallons would save me time.
I have found "smaller" batches take almost the exact same time. I save time: crushing grains, heating twice the strike water and sparging twice as much.

Halving the batch saves 45 min to an hour out of a 6 hour process. Drops in the bucket for amazing, tasty, beer!
 
people that brew 3 gallons then add 2 gallons of water are doing extract recipes, not all grain recipes.

when you brew from extract, you are already brewing from concentrate, so who cares if you do a 3 gallon boil or a 5 gallon boil? 3 gallons is easier/quicker to boil, you just have to add a little more hops since the 3 gallons is heavily saturated with sugar, and can't absorb the hops oils as easily.

...if diluting with 2 gallons of water after the boil makes beer taste like ****, then diluting with 3 gallons before the boil must REALLY make it taste like ****... see what i'm getting at there? concentrate is concentrate. period.
 
There has been debates on partial boils for some time. If I remember the results of blind taste tests showed people could not tell much difference. Some thought the partial was better and some liked the full boils better.

I personally think partials are fine. I do partials with the steeping grains wort results only, then add my extract and top off water. This way my extract has less time on the flame but the boil has plenty of stuff for the hops to stick to, but not too much.
 
Five gallons represents a kind of "sweet spot" in the logistics and other factors involved:

1. Five gallons of liquid is about as much as a normal adult can handle to lift & carry.

2. Five gallons is pretty well adapted to most heat sources that are readily available.

3. Five gallons enables the use of cheap and readily available brewing equipment (plastic buckets, Better Bottles, reasonably priced brewpots, cooler MLTs) that promote my primary brewing commandment, which is KISS).

4. Most homebrew publications and online references seem to use five gallons as the basic unit of brewing, so it's also handy.

Go lower, and you have to redo all the numbers every time you want to try another recipe, and you engage that previously mentioned "marginal effort" factor, where it takes you a good deal of the work to make 2.5 gallons as it does 5.

Go larger, say, 10 gallons, and you will benefit from that same "marginal effort" axiom, but you'll find that you may need to come up with another brewing setup altogether (a sculpture, pumps, etc., etc.) with concomitantly greater expense and complexity.
 
I brew 4.25 gal because I bought a 5 gal Better Bottle before I realized it was too small to do 5 gal batches! But I am doing AG BIAB with a 7 gal boil kettle, so for my equipment 4.25 gal is the sweet spot. When I get enough funds to begin kegging I will move to 5 gal batches.
 
rico567 said:
Five gallons represents a kind of "sweet spot" in the logistics and other factors involved:

1. Five gallons of liquid is about as much as a normal adult can handle to lift & carry.

2. Five gallons is pretty well adapted to most heat sources that are readily available.

3. Five gallons enables the use of cheap and readily available brewing equipment (plastic buckets, Better Bottles, reasonably priced brewpots, cooler MLTs) that promote my primary brewing commandment, which is KISS).

4. Most homebrew publications and online references seem to use five gallons as the basic unit of brewing, so it's also handy.

Go lower, and you have to redo all the numbers every time you want to try another recipe, and you engage that previously mentioned "marginal effort" factor, where it takes you a good deal of the work to make 2.5 gallons as it does 5.

Go larger, say, 10 gallons, and you will benefit from that same "marginal effort" axiom, but you'll find that you may need to come up with another brewing setup altogether (a sculpture, pumps, etc., etc.) with concomitantly greater expense and complexity.
Click to expand...

It also works out well for kegging (old soda kegs are 5-gallons), and for bottlers two cases is a nice quantity - enough where for most people, if they're brewing once a month or so they've usually got homebrew around but aren't overwhelmed.
 
For me, its because that's what "everyone else" was doing. A few of my friends did, the internet told me to, and I actually had some of the supplies on hand before I actually started brewing.

I pondered doing 1-2 gallon batches just so I could try new things more frequently, but I realized that even if I personally don't like the taste of the beer I brewed, its still beer, and there's still someone around me who will drink it.

Also, as mentioned, the soda kegs. I've got 4 now, and 5 more coming. Doesn't make sense to waste the CO2 filling blank space when it could be pushing delicious beer out into my glass.
 
Chilling, too. Since many brewers start out doing partial boils, you can do a 2.5- or 3-gallon boil (and then topping off) and still chill with nothing more than an ice bath.
 
Do whatever you like. My first 3 AG batches were 3-3.5 gallons, because like you, I didn't have a large enough pot. The problem was that I didn't create enough beer. Now I'm back to 5 gal batches :)
 
Beer_Guy said:
There has been debates on partial boils for some time. If I remember the results of blind taste tests showed people could not tell much difference.
Click to expand...

The local HB club did this with pretty tight controls, everyone could tell which was the partial boil. Not saying there is anything bad about partials, but I definately prefer the full boil. I relate the difference to a good high pressure coffee maker vs. an old perc style. I can enjoy both but have a favorite.
 
I think the most reasonable explanation to why the 5 gallon volume is due mostly to the available kegs. Since they are 5 gallon, I think most recipes fall within that volume increment.


Should the 3 gallon kegs had been the most widely available that would I am sure have become the standard. Had the 7 gallon ponies been the standard, same, same.
 
GilaMinumBeer said:
I think the most reasonable explanation to why the 5 gallon volume is due mostly to the available kegs. Since they are 5 gallon, I think most recipes fall within that volume increment.


Should the 3 gallon kegs had been the most widely available that would I am sure have become the standard. Had the 7 gallon ponies been the standard, same, same.
Click to expand...

See, I disagree that this is the PRIMARY reason. Most homebrewers, when starting out, don't keg. I think I'm fairly typical in that I bottled for probably a year and a half before getting a kegging setup.

Five gallons is just a good quantity - it's a manageable size to make (for boiling and for cooling), and two cases is a pretty good quantity to have of any one beer. Not so much you get sick of it before its gone, not so little that you *need* to brew every two weeks.

As to the full/partial boil question - it's got to have some impact, if for no other reason than you are impacting hop utilization. That's a question for another thread, though.
 
Because at normal gravities, that's about how much wort a packet of yeast wants to chew through. For Home Brewers, most things are built and or designed around 5 gallons increments. Why?

Five gallons of liquid is about as much as a normal adult can handle to lift & carry.
Click to expand...

Probably has the most to do with it. It's not just beer but other food items as well.

Or maybe it is all just about the size of available food grade buckets.
 
I never conveyed it as a Primary reasoning. More as a derived result. Most homebrewers starting out don't develope their own recipes either. Instead they usually brew from kits or use recipes from established brewers. Either of which has , often, moved to kegging for conveinience or has a market in moving you into kegging.

The logic I am using here is that "if" bottlers drove the volume then why would they settle for an average of 53 bottles rather than for even case numbers? Capice?
 
I have done 5 gallon extract batches. I'm switching to all grain and only have a 5 gallon brew pot. Since I just spent $85 dollar on an MLT, $45 on a wort chiller, and want to try out all grain on small scale. I'm going to do 3.5 gallon batches, full boil.

When I get confident with AG I'm going to get an 8 gallon pot and do 5 gallon batches. Simple.
 
I have a little two-gallon bucket that I use to do all grain batches on my stove. If I want to do a full five gallon batch I have to add extract to my wort to compensate for the top-up water. I'd rather be doing all-grain 10 gallon batches, but whatever!
 
The statments above and that White labs and Wyeast packets/tubes are made for a low to medium gravity 5 gallon batch (exceptions of course exist). I have a 10gallon pot but I won't do anymore then a 4gallon partial boil. I find it yields better tasting beer (I cool it quickly with about 2 gallons of 35 degree (F) water, to compensate for 1 gallon of boil lost). That and I only have 6.5 gallon primary fermenters (some plastic buckets and some glass carboys) which will only do 5 gals at a time. I sometimes bust out my mr. beer keg and make 2.5 gallons of a far out experimental beer just to see how it'll taste.
 
I think I'll be the odd one out so far. I agree. 5 gallon has been a common size since it's standard for 5 gallon carboys(water cooler jugs) and 5 gallon plastic buckets outside of homebrewing. Now for me, I've been using a single gallon size and not diluting even though it's from an extract. I already had a pot that would boil a gallon, and it was cheap and easy enough to get a gallon sized jug. I've even used a 1 gallon water jug as a temporary item now and again. My next step up will be a 5 gallon because of the reasons everyone has said. (Besides, why should I get a 3.5 gallon if I'm going to wind up buying a larger pot, or using a turkey frier, that I'd be using if I wasn't in an apartment that won't let us have propane above the first floor).

There does seem to be a lot of discussion about partial mash, partial boil, AA% extraction based on water to hops ratio and such, but with the quantities I'm doing right now, I'm not worried about any partials. Just not worth going under a gallon.

Oops, looks like there was a 2 gallon person up there.
 

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