How much grain in a 5 gallon cooler?

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EdWort

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I did a batch of brown ale yesterday from a recipe from a friend. I tried his and it was very tasty. It was 13.75 pounds of grain. When I doughed in, I think I could only fit maybe 2.5 gallons of water in there. It mashed at 155 and then I batch sparged at 168. Each time I was lucky to get 2.5 gallons in, to it took me a few batches to get my 7 gallon preboil volume. I use the stainless braid and I only had to recirculate maybe a quart before it cleared. The stainless braid rocks!

I boiled it down to 5.5 gallons and chilled it. MY O.G. is 1.054 where my friends was 1.063 for the same recipe. He uses a keggle system and fly sparges.

I calculate my effeciency at 60%. Any ideas on how to improve it?

I'm wondering if I need to move up to a 10 gallon cooler if I'm going to do beers like this.

An another note, the White Labs WLP051 California Ale V yeast had a lag time of only 6 hours since I made a starter Friday night. Starters are the way to go.
 
If you had 13.75 pounds of grain, and only room for 2.5 gals of water, then yes, that's probably a little too much grain for your mash/lauter tun.

To mash 13.75 lbs at a thick 1.0 qt per pound--and you wouldn't want to go any thicker than that--you'd need room for at least 13.75 quarts=3.44 gals. Plus, for batch sparging, you'd want to be able to collect 3-3.5 gals on each of two batches, so you'd need to be able to get closer to 5 gals in there in order to get 3.5 out in your first batch, due to grain absorbtion.

I think 12-12.5 is about the max amount of grain for a 5 gallon cooler.

As far as efficiency, getting your grain bed up to 168 before the sparge (whic means, of course, adding water that it hotter than 168) will also help, although I think having too much mash for you tun was your main issue.
 
At 75% efficiency I'm getting an OG for a 5 1/2 gallon batch of 1.071.
I'm pretty sure your problem is water volume. 3 1/2 gallons for the mash and 7 gallons for the sparge would be minimum amounts. With this large grain bill you should end up with about 8 1/2 gallons or more in your brew pot.
I would definitely go with a 10 gallon cooler if you want to keep brewing big beers like that. There is no need to waste the grain with lower efficiency.
I you can also do 2 smaller mashes or you can add some DME to compensate.
 
I figured so. My mash water was heated to175 and when it was all mixed it came in at 155 and stayed there for the 60 minute mash. I heated my sparge water (according to Denny Conn) to about 185 and it raised it to about 168 which is right on target according to his web page.

I'm going with a bigger cooler. I'll get one of the square one and use a longer ss braid with it next time I brew. Right now I have 11 gallons of Cider and 15 gallons of beer fermenting and I've run out of room.

thanks!
 
It sounds like H2O volume was the main problem but I would also look out for channeling do to the SS braid.
 
G. Cretin said:
It sounds like H2O volume was the main problem but I would also look out for channeling do to the SS braid.

I think that's not nearly as big an issue in batch sparging as it would be in fly sparging.
 
It's all a learning process anyway. I think it will still turn out to be a good beer.

On another note, I spread out all those spent grains out on my rocks yesterday and this morning, they were licked clean. :)
 
G. Cretin said:
Yer gonna have some fat A$$ deer around yer house.

Ya, eventually. I'm done brewing for a while. I'll rack this brown into a carboy or perhaps into a corney for secondary on Saturday. I'm leaving for Irleland on Sunday for a few pints of Guinness followed by a trip to Muenchen for a few Weissbiers before coming home.
 
I have a 5 gallon cooler and 13.75 lbs is about all the grain it will hold. As posted above, with that much grain, use 1 qt/lb for the water ratio. I fly sparge and consistently get between 75-80% effeciency. With that much grain, you shold have collected about 8.5 gallons of wort. I see someone else also posted this. For a normal brew of 1.050 gravity or so, you will only need about 10 lbs of grain. In those cases you can increase the water to grain ratio for the mash and only need to collect about 7 gallons or so for a 5.5 gal batch.
 
So on average how much grain could you use for a 7 gallon pre-boil volume. More than seven is pushing my kettle. Thanks.
 
For my normal brews, I use either 7.5# grain plus 1# brown sugar, or 9# grain and no sugar. I collect approx 6.75g for the boil and get an OG of 1.052 - 1.055. The biggest brew I ever did in the 5g cooler had 12.5# grain, and gave me an OG of 1.072. Again, I collected about 6.75g.

I fly sparge, and the sparge takes about 90 min.

I tried batch sparging a couple of weeks ago, and got about 5% less efficiency than normal, in exchange for a time saving ot 50 minutes.

-a.
 
That does it. Time to move to a larger cooler. I think I'll try a normal gravity beer first though and give batch sparging in it one more time. Thanks!
 
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