When 5 gallons just isn't enough....

I typically do 10 gallon batches but due to the limits of my mash tun (10 gallon round) I am limited to sub 1.060(ish) beers. I am working on a double IPA with an SG of around 1.075. My options are:

1. Roll with a 5.5 gallon batch
2. Max out my MT and do a 9 gallon batch (5.5 into one fementer, 3.5 into another)
3. Same as above but top off the 3.5 gallons with 2 gallons of water, giving me an SG of around 1.045. So I'd end up with 5.5 of double IPA and 5.5 of a session IPA.

Leaning towards option 3 unless someone convinces me it's a bad idea...

hmm might want to reconsider. As someone thats been trying to make a good session IPA I can tell you its not as simple as scaling back a regular IPA recipe.

Double IPA you need to concentrate on minimizing specialty malts to balance the alcohol. you want to design the grianbill around fermentability

session IPAs are opposite. you want a higher % of unfermentables and other things to offset the large hop character and small alcohol content

you wouldnt be able to do this by taking runnings from a DIPA I dont think. The DIPA would be way too cloying or the session IPA would be too watery

Cruise Kijiji for a few days until you snag a 70-quart Coleman Xtreme cooler for $30 and brew 10 gallons?

kombat said:

Cruise Kijiji for a few days until you snag a 70-quart Coleman Xtreme cooler for $30 and brew 10 gallons?

Click to expand...

I actually just bought a brand new one at a yard sale for $10... it'll be a few weeks until I have time to convert it to a MT though and I wanted to brew this weekend.

Couldn't you just take the ball valve/nipple/nuts/O-ring from your existing cooler mash tun and move them over to the new one? What are you using for a false bottom? Mine is simply a bazooka screen.

At any rate, if it's a bridge too far, then I would just brew 5.5 gallons of good double IPA than risk wasting time/money/ingredients on something that will in all likelihood not be as good as I'd hoped.

Drop a fraction of your base malt, mash a 1.60 grain bill, and add ~15 points per gallon of DME with 5 minutes to flame out. I've used this method many times for big beers (barley wines, tripels, etc) to great success. The really nice thing about this method is that you can take a gravity reading before measuring out the DME and hit your target OG exactly.

thanks for the input m00ps...I posted the question because I wasn't sure what topping off would do...figure it's gonna throw off my water chemistry anyway...now i'm just considering 1 and 2...guess i could always add DME but that gets expensive.

You could always use DME or LME to get the gravity where you want it for a 10g batch.

ORRR

You could do two mashes and sparges, although that might be time prohibitive.