Max grain bill your pot pot will hold for BIAB.

I did my largest beer to date today. My 10.5 gallon pot with a steamer insert maxes out at 7 gallons of water and a 15 pound grain bill. To go any bigger I would have to get a bigger bag and do away with the steamer pot.

SO how big is your pot and how big of a grain bill can you use in it using BIAB?

5 gallon pot and I can cram about 11# at 1.23ppg

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I was about to ask a similar question. I don't want to hijack the thread but I'm going to ask my question anyway.

I have a keggle. I did a 21 pound grain bill, in a 11.33 gallons of water. It was tight, but I got it in there. Maybe I could go la little arger, but that's as big as I can go and feel safe.

So that sort of answers the above question.

My issue is pulling the wet hot bag out is a pain in the ass. The bag would naturally bow and it would scrape along the sides of the keggle. There was a sucking moment and I had to fiddle with the bag to get it to pop out.

What I want to do, is use the bag inside a perforated basket.

A 62 quart perforated basket by Bayou is 14" wide and 14.62" deep. If my measurements are right, the inner lip of my keggle is 13.75" If I cut the top of my keggle off, I could fit this inside.

On the other hand, the 36 quart is 13.5" wide and 11" deep. I can widen the opening of my keggle to fit this inside and I wouldn't have to cut the handles/top off- handles are handy and I'd rather keep them on the keggle.

What I don't understand is difference in the grain bill I can fit into the 36 quart v the 62 quart. I also don't know if this is the best way to solve my big grain bill issue in BIAB. I think the solid edges of a smoothly rising pot would solve a lot of my 'remove the big heavy hot bag' issues I keep having.

If this is to much off topic, I'll start a new thread. Maybe answering my question will help the initial poster better understand what he is capable of doing???

Any info is appreciated.

11 gallon pot, 20lbs of grain and 7 gallons of water so far is my max. I could have done either another gallon of water or some more grain (water would have been better). Pulled only around 63% efficiency though, compared to 83% using the same equipment and water, but only 12lbs grain.

10 gallon Blingmann kettle with 8 gallons of water + 20.5 pounds of grain. I was making a Hopslam clone and it was definitely at maximum capacity for my kettle.

Well using basic math, the difference is the smaller size has a volume of ~6.8 gallons, and the larger one has a volume of 9.75 gallons.

Armed with that information read this thread: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/how-big-your-mash-tun-needs-123585/ to lead you in the direction to determine how much grain you will be able to fit in each vessel. NB: yes, I realize the post is for traditional mashing, but it does give great insight to figure out your goals.

Retrofit said:

What I want to do, is use the bag inside a perforated basket.

A 62 quart perforated basket by Bayou is 14" wide and 14.62" deep. If my measurements are right, the inner lip of my keggle is 13.75" If I cut the top of my keggle off, I could fit this inside.

On the other hand, the 36 quart is 13.5" wide and 11" deep. I can widen the opening of my keggle to fit this inside and I wouldn't have to cut the handles/top off- handles are handy and I'd rather keep them on the keggle.

Any info is appreciated.

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No worries about hijacking. I know my max I was throwing it out there for general discussion. As a matter of fact I decided on my next brew (an Arrogant bastard clone) That I will have to lower the grain bill and make it up with some DME.

40 qt pot with steamer basket. If using steamer 13.5 lbs is a largest grain bill. Without it, I have done 18 lbs with room to spare. I think 20 lbs will fit

I use a keggle and I'm not sure what my limit is. I did try a 10 gallon Arrogant Bastard clone with over 20 lbs of grain and it was too much to handle.

As I write, I'm mashing 14.5 lbs of grain in 7.75 gallons of water in my 10 gallon pot. I use a cheap steamer basket tray to keep the bag above the elements in the bottom.

To figure out how much room things will take, I took some of the formulas from here and wrote a little excel program that works off of my grain bull. Pretty easy. My guess is that the pot would max out at something like 19 lbs of grain, if I want to start with the full volume of water.

Retrofit said:

What I don't understand is difference in the grain bill I can fit into the 36 quart v the 62 quart. I also don't know if this is the best way to solve my big grain bill issue in BIAB. I think the solid edges of a smoothly rising pot would solve a lot of my 'remove the big heavy hot bag' issues I keep having.

Click to expand...

I'm having the same issue with my keggle. I'm looking into making a customized basket that will fit the keggle's narrow top opening (without cutting the entire top off of it) yet still utilize the majority of the keggle's interior space. Hopefully I'll have a solution by the end of this year.

I just did a BIAB with 13.25 pounds in a 20 quart pot using a water to grain ratio of 1.0 qt/lb. I probably could have maxed with another pound. But as it was, my efficiency suffered and after 2 batch sparges, I ended-up with a extraction efficiency of under 65%.

I don't use a basket and I don't drain my mash pot. I use a separate pot for the sparging.

My pot is 8 gallons. I've done as much as 18lbs of grain in there. The efficiency was good, but it was a messy process with the mash being about 1/4" from the rim of the pot.

60qt 20lbs..... until it self destructed.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/warning-tamale-pots-all-grain-biab-276854/

warex said:

No worries about hijacking. I know my max I was throwing it out there for general discussion. As a matter of fact I decided on my next brew (an Arrogant bastard clone) That I will have to lower the grain bill and make it up with some DME.

Click to expand...

Why not use all the grain but not all the water when you mash? You then have a choice of either pulling out the bag of grain and adding top up water or pulling out the bag and doing sparge step with either hot or cold water to get your volume. Be sure to squeeze out all you can from the bag.

As soon as you start removing water from the mash your efficiency will suffer. There is a point where the more grain you add the less extract you get due to absorption!

Not sure in US units, but about 2.25L/KG mash thickness is where things start to fall apart

Sparging can help this dramatically

RM-MN said:

Why not use all the grain but not all the water when you mash? You then have a choice of either pulling out the bag of grain and adding top up water or pulling out the bag and doing sparge step with either hot or cold water to get your volume. Be sure to squeeze out all you can from the bag.

Click to expand...

On my last brew session (Bee Cave Brewery Pale Ale), I added about 2 gallons of top off water after a 60 minute mash (10.5 gallon batch in a 15 gallon pot) and got 75% efficiency.

RM-MN said:

Why not use all the grain but not all the water when you mash? You then have a choice of either pulling out the bag of grain and adding top up water or pulling out the bag and doing sparge step with either hot or cold water to get your volume. Be sure to squeeze out all you can from the bag.

Click to expand...

I was using a steamer pot inside my bigger pot. This means that some of the water sits between the two pots and is not mixed with the grain. The grain was as dry as I was comfortable with. ( Ok dry is not the right word but it was not as soupy as my other batches have been.)

I could go heaver but first I will have to lose the steamer pot and find a bigger stronger bag. But this setup works nice for regular beers. So it seems easier to just make up the difference with DME when I want a big beer.