How many gallons can i get out of my 10.5 gallon kettle?

Hey everyone, I recently upgraded to an all grain set up which includes a 10.5 SS kettle. I was talking to my landlord today, and he said that if I brewed 8-10 gallons of pale ale, he would knock the cost of the brew off my rent, and we would split the beer. Sounds pretty good right? I'm wondering how many gallons of wort I can get out of my 10.5 gallon kettle. Maybe 8 or so? Then could I just split the wort into 2 fermenters? Any advice is appreciated!

Remember you're going to have some boil off as well. I use my 10 gallon kettle for a 5 gallon batch but I could probably go to about 6.5 gallons. I boil off two gallons an hour so I gotta start with 7 gallons.

what about trying a partial boil?

If needed you could have about 9 gallons to start with and basically do a partial boil. Your efficiency may be terrible though... I guess the more I think about it, partial boils with AG dont really work too well. You could do a PM-type deal to do a partial boil if you wanted to get 2-5 gallon batches out of it

I see. I'm brewing BIAB, so what if I sparged the bag to get better efficiency?

or what about adding light DME if the efficiency is poor?

mandobud16 said:

Hey everyone, I recently upgraded to an all grain set up which includes a 10.5 SS kettle. I was talking to my landlord today, and he said that if I brewed 8-10 gallons of pale ale, he would knock the cost of the brew off my rent, and we would split the beer. Sounds pretty good right? I'm wondering how many gallons of wort I can get out of my 10.5 gallon kettle. Maybe 8 or so? Then could I just split the wort into 2 fermenters? Any advice is appreciated!

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I have a 10G kettle and can get a 6.25G batch in my primary and do AG. This accounts for boil off, trub loss, dead space. I start with 8.79G of wort.

If you wanted to do partial boils to get to 10 you would have to split the batch into 2 primaries unless you have a really big one. You would also have to have a mash tun to handle the larger grain bill or if you do BIAB a large enough kettle to handle over 15lbs of grain.

I use a 10G cooler to mash and can handle about #20 of grain.

Most who do 10g batches start with 15G kettles

What is your grain bill? You would need about 14# to do a 10 gallon batch of 1.050 beer. So that's 5.25 gallons for mashing and the grain takes up .08x14=1.12 gallons of space.

So you could mash 14# using about 7 gallons of space. Since you BIAB and there's no sparge you could bring that thing up as full as you have the cahones for. Using FermCap you could probably boil 9 gallons....just design your recipe for 10 gallons and boil all you can and then dilute to get to your post boil OG.

mandobud16 said:

or what about adding light DME if the efficiency is poor?

Click to expand...

Yes I keep a bag handy for that reason. Also there is a nice mashing calculator if you search on google for can I mash this. It will tell you how much room the grain plus water takes up.

I plan on using 17-18 lbs of grain for a pale ale... I plan to mash BIAB with 7-8 gal of h2o, then sparge in 2-4 gal of h20 to get the highest efficiency possible. I'm also going to up the bittering hops because of poor utilization. Then I'll top off in the fermenter. Does that sound about right?

mandobud16 said:

I plan on using 17-18 lbs of grain for a pale ale... I plan to mash BIAB with 7-8 gal of h2o, then sparge in 2-4 gal of h20 to get the highest efficiency possible. I'm also going to up the bittering hops because of poor utilization. Then I'll top off in the fermenter. Does that sound about right?

Click to expand...

So 8 gallons plus 18 lbs of grain is about 9.54 gallons.

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