All Grain water volume question?

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vegas20s

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I live in an apartment. I REALLY want to go to whole grain.
Lets say I want to mash 10lbs of malt. I would need 3 to 4 gallons of water. I could to this with 2 pots. Then if I build a luater tun I could use this to mash in.
What I'm not getting is the sparging part. John Palmers HOW TO BREW says to use 1.5 times water to sparge. So wouldn't I end up with 9 to 10 gallons of wort? What am I missing here? Am I going to let that much boil off?
 
So I could use a two 3 gallon pots with a lauter tun to do all grain.
 
I live in an apartment. I REALLY want to go to whole grain.
Lets say I want to mash 10lbs of malt. I would need 3 to 4 gallons of water. I could to this with 2 pots. Then if I build a luater tun I could use this to mash in.
What I'm not getting is the sparging part. John Palmers HOW TO BREW says to use 1.5 times water to sparge. So wouldn't I end up with 9 to 10 gallons of wort? What am I missing here? Am I going to let that much boil off?


Easiest way imo is 1.25 gallons per pound of grain in the mash. I would figure on your stove a gallon an hour boil off per pot (gotta do a boil to be sure) so for a 5 gallon batch you need to start with 7 gallons in the boil pots. Do your mash and then drain and vorlouf and measure your volume from the first runnings. Subtract that volume from the 7 gallons and the difference is your sparge volume. I split that in half and do two sparges ( I get better efficiency)

ORRRRRR you can read DEATHBREWERS easy stove top brewing thread ( stickied) and it will step by step you through brewing on your stove top.
 
So I could use a two 3 gallon pots with a lauter tun to do all grain.

I guess. Boiling 3 gallons in a 3 gallon pot is a little exciting, and if you do them sequentially, one pot will be high gravity and one will be low gravity; that makes calculation of hop utilization a bit more tricky.

You can get an 8 gallon aluminum pot from Wal-Mart for about $25; might save you some headaches (and a lot of cleaning up.)

http://www.walmart.com/ip/TAMALE-SEAFOOD-STMR/13370045
 
They are like 3.5 gallons but I was figuring they would boil 3 gallons max. I'm thinking a cheap pot sounds real helpful though.
 
Easiest way imo is 1.25 gallons per pound of grain in the mash. I would figure on your stove a gallon an hour boil off per pot (gotta do a boil to be sure) so for a 5 gallon batch you need to start with 7 gallons in the boil pots. Do your mash and then drain and vorlouf and measure your volume from the first runnings. Subtract that volume from the 7 gallons and the difference is your sparge volume. I split that in half and do two sparges ( I get better efficiency)....

That all sounds about right, but I think you may have meant 1.25Q instead of 1.25G per pound of grain. Otherwise, that's a lot of boiling to evaporate all that water :)
 
You can get an 8 gallon aluminum pot from Wal-Mart for about $25; might save you some headaches (and a lot of cleaning up.)

http://www.walmart.com/ip/TAMALE-SEAFOOD-STMR/13370045

A lot of stoves can't heat a really large quantity of water. Unless your pot can somehow utilize more than one burner for heat (not practical on most stoves, unless the pot is a MONSTER) then you will likely have problems heating more than about 5 gallons to a boil.

Wrapping aluminum foil around the pot kind of helped me a bit on my last boil... but I don't think it would have helped enough to make 8 gallons very practical.

If you want to brew inside, why not just brew smaller batches?
 
A lot of stoves can't heat a really large quantity of water. Unless your pot can somehow utilize more than one burner for heat (not practical on most stoves, unless the pot is a MONSTER) then you will likely have problems heating more than about 5 gallons to a boil.

The Wal-Mart pot is a monster. It covers two of my burners at once. (One of the reasons I bought two of em.)
 
I'm going to do a mini mash oatmeal stout this weekend. I'll be using 4.5 lbs of grain and oats with a mesh bag and a 3.5 gallon pot. If this goes well I'm thinking it can't be that much harder to do an all grain.
 
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