High gravity beer... 5 gallon MLT

[tdexterc]

Hello everyone! I returned from my LHBS today with a box of goodies for my first all grain batch, and already I’ve run into a problem… I’m a fairly ambitious person so I decided to try my hand at the all-grain version of a Hop Rod Rye clone I found posted on this site here. I knew it was high gravity beer, but I didn’t realize just how much more grain it would be using than a standard gravity recipe. I’ve got about 15 lbs of grain, and wouldn’t you know it, the limit is about 13 lbs for my homemade 5 gallon round MLT cooler… My initial thought was “Screw it, I’ll MAKE it fit!” but then I came to my senses, and decided that wasting almost $40 worth of grain and hops was not worth it, and that I should just wait an extra day or two to figure out a solution. The idea that I came up with is this: Mix all the grain together, divide it into 2x 7.5lb ammounts, mash and sparge one half of the total grain, bring the resulting wort to a quick boil to sanitize and store it in the sanitized fermenter (because my dinky brew kettle barely holds 5 gallons at the rim). Then, I would repeat the mashing and sparging with the other half of the grain, and use this second batch of wort (and maybe some from the first batch too) to boil the hops with, then just blend both batches together, and pitch the yeast. It’ll make for a rather long brew day, but hopefully this will work. Does anybody see any problems with this, or maybe even an easier way to go about this? Thanks for your help!

 

[heckels]

I ran into this same problem quickly when I started with a 5 gal MLT. I had a similar thought as you and quickly realized how long it would make my brew day.

There are two viable options:
1. Use DME to replace some of your base malt.
2. Spend $40 and by a 10 gal Rubbermaid from home depot.

But, it sounds like you may not even have a large enough kettle to do a full boil (approx 7 gals for a 5 gallon batch). If that's the case, I'd suggest scaling your recipe to a 3 gallon batch. That'd solve the problem for both you MLT and the BK.