Partial Boil - What's the minimum size of the boil?

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Hwk-I-St8

Hwk-I-St8

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I'm getting back into brewing with a friend (both of us brewed in the 90's). I was thinking I was boiling over 3 gallons back then, he's talking about boiling 2 gallons with a 3 gallon kettle.

I would have thought boiling less than half the batch size would be
a) really inefficient
and
b) produce marginal results.

Clearly there must be an absolute minimum size and perhaps also a size under which the results will be marginal.

Any guidance or experience with this? Is 2 gallons enough?

I ultimately want to do full boils but we are having to re-acquire brewing supplies and I don't want to drop $200 on a nice boil kettle too. I want to make sure we're going to stick with it first.
 
Hwk-I-St8 said:
Clearly there must be an absolute minimum size and perhaps also a size under which the results will be marginal.
Click to expand...

Possibly true, but only because "marginal" isn't clearly defined. There are degrees of marginality. So I doubt there's actually an absolute minimum. Or at least, the line of the minimum is fuzzy.

I'd say 2 gallons is OK. I might say don't go lower than that, but 1.95 gallons is probably not terrible. If it's relatively painless to go up to 3 gallons, then do it!

If you had said 1 gallon, I'd say that's too low.

Note: Get some Fermcap so you can boil more than 2 gallons in a 3 gallon pot.
I've occasionally done top-offs on the fly: Boil water on a second burner and add to the main pot mid-boil. Reduces the boil off.
 
I just had a conversation that touched on this with my Grandma. She remembers her dad brewing with extract from a single can without boiling anything using just well water and a can of malt. She and Dad both recall my Grandfather making beer with a pot that I now have, I believe it's 2 1/2 quarts, and boiling it twice, once each with a can of malt, then adding tap water.

I recently did a quick and nasty one with a friend using just about half a gallon of water boiled in an electric teakettle... But I'm not recommending this... I just did it fast to get him interested in coming back to learn more... It worked.

I imagine that it really depends on your water source as to how much you need to boil to improve your beer. The water from my tap is really pretty decent. I'm running four filters in decreasing microns (sediment, carbon, carbon block, I micron) just to kill the chlorinated remenant I sometimes get. I would feel just fine not boiling any of my water at this point.
Without my filters, I'd want to boil at least half of it to drive off the small amount of chlorination that would otherwise be in there.
Also, as McGarnigle pointed out; what do you consider marginal? I'll drink most any beer if I've screwed it up or an old keg needs killed, but I won't really enjoy it that much. Is marginal acceptable? Or is marginal that point when your beer is not just good but Good?
 
Domminigan said:
I just had a conversation that touched on this with my Grandma. She remembers her dad brewing with extract from a single can without boiling anything using just well water and a can of malt. She and Dad both recall my Grandfather making beer with a pot that I now have, I believe it's 2 1/2 quarts, and boiling it twice, once each with a can of malt, then adding tap water.

I recently did a quick and nasty one with a friend using just about half a gallon of water boiled in an electric teakettle... But I'm not recommending this... I just did it fast to get him interested in coming back to learn more... It worked.

I imagine that it really depends on your water source as to how much you need to boil to improve your beer. The water from my tap is really pretty decent. I'm running four filters in decreasing microns (sediment, carbon, carbon block, I micron) just to kill the chlorinated remenant I sometimes get. I would feel just fine not boiling any of my water at this point.
Without my filters, I'd want to boil at least half of it to drive off the small amount of chlorination that would otherwise be in there.
Also, as McGarnigle pointed out; what do you consider marginal? I'll drink most any beer if I've screwed it up or an old keg needs killed, but I won't really enjoy it that much. Is marginal acceptable? Or is marginal that point when your beer is not just good but Good?
Click to expand...

I want to brew beer that:
  1. I enjoy drinking
  2. I can share proudly with my friends.

I also want to be able to come up with recipes and be able to reasonably predict IBU's and OG.
 
Hwk-I-St8 said:
.....I ultimately want to do full boils but we are having to re-acquire brewing supplies and I don't want to drop $200 on a nice boil kettle too. I want to make sure we're going to stick with it first.
Click to expand...


You don't have to spend $200 on a kettle (unless you just want to).

Adventures in Homebrewing has a couple of 8 gallon kettles for less than $60 depending on whether you want one or two ports on it.

8 Gallon One Weld

8 Gallon Two Weld

Not a bad price, imo, for that size kettle. I paid almost that same price for my 5 gallon kettle when I first started.
 
Reasonably close predictions for me would probably be somewhere in the range of 2 1/2 to 3 gallons minimum depending on your water.
I thought it was in my first post, but I must have erased it. Mechanically filtering and carbon filtering my water has had a discernible difference on my hop additions. We've got somewhat hard water here, the filtration doesn't really change that, but it does make the hops go further than they used to.
 

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