JJWP
Well-Known Member
With the winter arriving here in Chicago I am now relegated to brewing my 5 gallon all grain batches indoors on my weak gas range. As it is really tough to bring 6.5 or 7 gal of preboil volume up to even a weak boil (even with pot sitting across two burners) I'm considering doing some sort of hybrid split pot method. But here is the catch - I CAN get 4.5 to 5 gal to a boil in a reasonable amount of time. It's just that last couple of gallons that seem to max out my stoves abilities...
So - I'm thinking of doing a 4.5 gal boil in my primary kettle, and collecting another 2 or 2.5 gal of wort into a smaller pot - I'd probably mix the wort to achieve a standard gravity across both pots. Could I get away with only boiling the primary kettle (while keeping the "backup" kettle at around 200 degrees or so - not boiling) and adding the "extra" wort into the boil half way through or so once enough evaporation has occurred? I'd like to avoid messing around with splitting hop additions and I definitely do not want to be concerned with chilling two separate pots. Does anyone do anything similar? Does this approach really throw off any gravity calcualtions, hop calculations, etc?
So - I'm thinking of doing a 4.5 gal boil in my primary kettle, and collecting another 2 or 2.5 gal of wort into a smaller pot - I'd probably mix the wort to achieve a standard gravity across both pots. Could I get away with only boiling the primary kettle (while keeping the "backup" kettle at around 200 degrees or so - not boiling) and adding the "extra" wort into the boil half way through or so once enough evaporation has occurred? I'd like to avoid messing around with splitting hop additions and I definitely do not want to be concerned with chilling two separate pots. Does anyone do anything similar? Does this approach really throw off any gravity calcualtions, hop calculations, etc?