First all grain batch mash question

My friend and I are making our first all grain today, an American IPA (5gal). One thing we are unclear on for the mashing stage is how much water to use. It says approx. 1L of water per pound of grain. So we will have roughly 15L of water in our mash. Does this mean we should sparge with 8L of water to bring our primary up to 23L?

What if we have too much or too little malt when we rack into our primary? (23L)

Welcome to the forum.
Mashing with 1L water per lb grain is about as thick as you can go. Most people (including me) would recommend 1.25 - 1.5L per lb for an APA. I only use 1L per lb for EPAs.
No matter what mash thickness you use, you will lose approximately 0.5L for each lb grain to absorption, so if you start with 15 lb grain, and mash with 20L water, you will only end up with about 12.5L wort. (The other 7.5L will remain in the grains).
When you say 23L for the primary, do you mean that your primary fermenter has a capacity of 23L, or that you want to add 23L wort to your primary?
You need to leave at least 4L head space in the primary, and preferably 6L. Otherwise the fermenting beer will overflow the primary, and you will need a blow off tube, and lose some beer in the process.
Finally, before you add the wort to the primary, you need to boil for about 1 hour. The boil typically boils off about 4 - 5L water, so you will want to start the boil with 4 - 5L more wort than will end up in the primary.

-a.

Thanks for your reply, that helps up a lot!
When I say 23L I mean that we have it marked off at 23L, but there is much more space in our primary, at least 50% more.

Welcome to HBT

Very important: Sparge slowly!

If you fly-sparge and are done in five minutes, you did it wrong. Take your time and get all that sugar out of the grain.

Good luck!

Yeah I've got the book "How to Brew" by John J. Palmer, he mentions that you should sparge and let it sit for up to 15 minutes to help get all the sugars out.

Thanks for the greeting kappclark! These forums are great, I will start using them more often, very helpful. I am going to post our three tier brewstand here, were in the planning stages now. It will be a welded stainless steel stand, as we work in a fab shop. I have many projects in mind - all inspired by HBT!

So we just finished our mash, were boiling right now.
First mash seemed to go okay, but not great - hope you guys can help me out a bit.

We mashed 15lbs of grain with about 20L of water for an hour, and sparged it with about 15L at the same temp. We ended up with only about 15L of malt in the end.
So now we will be short of our 23L after the boil, and just plan on topping our primary up with cold water before pitching the yeast, just like we did with our extract brews.

What can we do next time to avoid this problem next time - or is this normal?

By the way, the wort smells great!

Understanding the beer math is important but once you're done buy Beersmith and make your life easier! It may not be perfect for every situation but you can adjust it and it does the math for you.

This is a great tutorial on all-grain homebrew http://hbd.org/cascade/dennybrew/

Denny keeps it simple and straightforward.

The hbd link is very good, only thing I still don't understand is how much wort do I want in my kettle during the boil?

danimal23 said:

The hbd link is very good, only thing I still don't understand is how much wort do I want in my kettle during the boil?

Click to expand...

I boil off about 1.5 gallons per hour. That's about 5.5 liters or so, I believe. Everyone's system is different, but most people will boil off 4-8 liters in an hour. So, you need to start with that much more wort in the boil kettle at the beginning.