6.5 Gal Mashtun - How big a brew?

[nickrjsmith]

Hi,

I've recently made a 6.5 gal mashtun. I did my usual brew in it with 4kg malt (8.8lbs) and when I mashed the mash only came up about 1/2 way. The mash therefore went cool too quikly as there was too much room in the tun.

My question is this.

What's the biggest mash I can do from this in the sense of gallons?

Could I double the grain / mash. Keep the temp up as I want and sparge twice the amount to do 10 gals total (after a boil)

Or even... Could I partigyle this size with success?

I have two 5 gal kegs, two 5 gal fermenting bins and would like to fill them both from one mash.

I'm hoping for a SG of about 1048-1052ish. Is there enough room?

Thanks - N

 

[Mysticmead]

http://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml scroll to can I mash it

 

[nickrjsmith]

Thanks. 16lbs takes up 6.2 glas of space. Perfect! I can do two brews at once!!!!

Cheers mystic. Drinking one to you now.

 

[kanzimonson]

Sounds like you made a Zapap two-bucket mash tun? I used that for a long time and found that I could get about 16-17# of grain in there if I mashed at 1.4qts/#

If this is the type of mashtun you have, you might want to consider what I did - I would mash in my BK so that I could apply heat to the batch. Then after conversion was complete, I would dump the mash into the bucket and begin sparging. Of course, this is dependent on you having a second kettle so that you can heat your sparge water as well.