BIAB Advice

I made a recent post about putting together a recipe for extract based light ales, and got lots of cost saving advice to look into all-grain or BIAB. I realized I have all the additional equipment necessary for BIAB, namely a 12 gallon boil kettle and a high output propane cooker. Along with my other brewing equipment, it seems I am more ready for BIAB all-grain than I thought.

JohnnyBrewGood offered me some good starting advice which got me interested in BIAB. Couple of questions come to mind.....Do the grains that I need for my mash already come milled/crushed, or will I need to do that myself? I already use 5 gallon paint strainer bags (Lowes Home Improvement) to strain the trub from my wort when transferring to FV. Will this same type of bag be satisfactory for BIAB? Lastly, is there a good thread or resource to get the feel of BIAB which puts things in a fairly straightforward and easy to understand format?

Thanks for the advice!!

 

The one issue I see with your setup as described is that the bag is not going to fit around the outside of your kettle. Also, you will need some way of suspending the bag above your primary vessel, or a secondary vessel to put it into while you are sparging and/or draining the wort out of the bag.

You can get your grains pre-crushed at any online retailer or brewshop, but if you plan to store them it is better to get unmilled and crush yourself. You can also get a finer crush which will increase your efficiency. I get about 60% with pre-milled, 75% with my own mill.

 

Depending on where you get it from, you usually have the option to have the store grind the grain for you, but doing BIAB you often want the grain ground more fine, so getting a mill is a good investment, even though you don't need it immediately.

I would get a Wilser bag, it is definitely worth the money. Much higher quality, and custom fit to your pot.

There are lots of good posts on the BIAB subform under the all grain forum here, so read up there and come back with specific questions to clarify.

 

Personally, I BIAB in my 16 gallon Old Bayou kettle and I bought a bag large enough for the kettle and made of very strong fine mesh. You can find those on line for $30-$40 bucks. I would say though if you are going the BIAB route, get a false bottom or something you can put in the bottom of your kettle to keep the bag off the bottom. That way if you need to add heat while mashing, you don't take the chance of harming the bottom of your bag sitting on the bottom of the kettle.

 

I still don't understand why people start with extract brewing.

BIAB All Grain brewing is just so easy, paint strainer bag, kettle, thermometer, that's basically all you need. Kettle mashing works fine, no need for an insulated cooler mash tun.

 

I did see that one BIAB brewer uses a turkey fryer basket to hold the strainer bag and grains, and this basket lowers into the main boil kettle. With a simple system to raise and lower the basket, it may be an easy solution to the advice given here.

 

Get yourself a Wilserbrewing bag. Custom made to fit your kettle, well worth the money. I get all my grains crushed, and have no problem with efficiency, usually hitting my OG number within a few points. I wrap my kettle with an old winter jacket during the mash to help keep the temp.

 

But what efficiency is the recipe designed for? If I design the recipe for 50% efficiency and you hit the OG right on, does that mean you got good efficiecny? No, it means you got the efficiency the recipe was designed for.

On my first BIAB attempt I just used the recipe as written, expecting an OG of 1.052. Instead my OG was 1.070 because I got much higher efficiency than the recipe was expecting. It took me a few tries before I figured out the with the finer milling I was doing for BIAB required some adjustment to the recipe.

 

Great topic. I just did my first BIAB 2 weekends ago. I did a SMaSH 2 row citra IPA. It smelled delicious the other day when I cracked open that bucket to throw the dry hops in there.

Anyways, get a good bag. I'd recommend going to your local homebrew store and getting the Wilser brew bag. My LHBS had it in stock. $8. I used it and had plenty of room to fit the pot both width and depth. Nice and strong and I wasn't worried about it tearing with the weight of the mashed grist. I've heard that's the main issue with the painters bags from Lowes and HD is that they can tear down their seams.

Make sure you use a proper calculator for the strike volume and strike temp. There are several out there. Brewers friend had it perfect. I was going for a 4 gallon batch as I only have an 8 gallon kettle. It said I needed 5.7 gallons of water to yield 4. I actually ended up just short of 4 gallons when all was said and done...probably like 3.7/3.8 gallons. Next time, I'll probably just go with 2 gallon rule of thumb. 1 gallon lost to the grist and 1 gallon lost in boil to yield the wort volume. Or if I sense I'm short, I'll heat up some water real quick to 152 degrees and sparge the grain over another pot to get some additional wort.

When you are done with the mash, put a pot or something in your sink and place a strainer in the pot. Make sure the pot is a size such that your strainer is simply resting around the rim of the pot with room between the bottom of the pot and the bottom of the strainer so that the last bits of water have a place to collect to return to the boil. This is also the apparatus I would use to sparge if need be. I imagine next time, if I want a 5 gallon batch, I could run a gallon or 2 of water through the grains to batch sparge and return to the boil to get me from 4 to 5 in the 8 gallon kettle. Either way, I definitely recommend having some sort of drainage set up to collect that last bit of water from the grains.

That's all I got. From there on, it's boil and add hops just like extract brewing. I'm not looking back either. I'm all grain using this method from here on out. It's way more satisfying and you have way more control over your unique brews. Have fun with it. It's cheaper to buy grain than to buy extract all day everyday anyways.

 

And who really cares about efficiency unless you are making 100 gallons? The whole point of BIAB is to skip sparging and go directly to the boil. Just need to add a small extra amout of grains and adjust with water to reach desired pre boil gravity.

 

I started right off the bat with BIAB. Started with 5G paint strainer bags and they did the job, but in my 7.5G pot made for a thick mash, very tight fitting foe the size of the kettle. And they aren't that strong of a bag. I now use wilserbag and much happier with it. So it's unlikely the 5G paint strainer bag is going to work, it will be real small in a 12G pot.

I also strained wort through the 5G paint strainer bag and worked fine for that purpose. But now that I use a wilser hop bag during boil, trub is far less and the paint strainer bag no longer catches anything.

 

There is a very nice BIAB pictorial by @seven in the BIAB subforum. You should read that. Some very good information there.

I have also put a few bits and pieces together on BIAb and a few topics that might be useful to you going forward.

Those are in my signature if you are interested.

Bag: Get a @wilserbrewer custom bag. Great piece of quality kit.

11G Megapot, 5.5 gallon batch, custom @Wilserbrewerbag in action


Pot size: Twice the planned batch size is a reasonable guide. Others go bigger particularly if making a lot of big (high OG) beers.

Single vessel all grain brewing is a very practical and consistent method for making great tasting beer in my experience. Best of luck with your endeavors.

 

My point was that I've never had a problem with BIAB, grain crush, and hitting the OG. I've done kits from NB, and recipes taken from this forum, always buying the grains milled. Some people say you have to double mill, or mill extra fine for BIAB, but that has yet to be an issue for me.

 

i think you're forgetting the point of efficiency numbers in recipes. if you get 70% from your rig and i get 85-90% (typical for me) then who ever has the efficiency that is closest to the one in the recipe is going to be closest to the recipes OG. so it would seem your system has a very "common" efficiency, or at least one that seems to be very similar to the % used in the kits or brewshop produced recipes.

but the point of an efficiency % in a recipe is so that i can scale my grain bill down to account for my 90% efficiency vs your 70%. without that % being noted in a recipe, a low efficient system will undershoot, a high efficient will overshoot. it doesnt make my system better than yours, or worse, or somebody right or wrong, its just how to translate the recipe to different systems.

 

I totally get the efficiency numbers and agree with you 100%. Just saying that anyone who is thinking about BIAB, but might come across some of the nonsense about having to have a double crush, or milling so fine that you got flour for BIAB to work. A normal grain crush can work fine for BIAB.

 

you're totally right, and that's a really good point. its totally not necessary to double crush. single is totally fine.

in fact, since i typically do small batches, trub/hop loss can be a real bummer, so im actually thinking of going back to a single crush to try and get rid of some of the flour that comes from double crush. for larger batches it might not be an issue, but for smaller BIAB batches, single crush might be a better idea. grain is cheap.

 

Don't waste your money on a LHBS bag. They are crap. I had one- lasted three brews before starting to rip. Bought the grand slam package from Wilser and very satisfied.

As for the false bottom I don't feel it's really necessary. If you have a pulley, like in the Wilser package then simply lift it up a bit if you need to turn on the heat. That's what I do.

 

I don't even worry about lifting the bag. If even needed, applying heat during the mash is very low, to slowly raise a degree or two. Anyone who thinks they need a false bottom and is applying so much heat during the mash that it would damage the bag got issues with their process.

 

I put a stainless steel vegetable strainer at the bottom of my brew pot - it elevates the bag like 1" so it keeps the bag off the very bottom. The only tricky part is after you lift the bag out of the pot you have to remember to go "bobbing for strainers" with big ass bbq tongs to get the strainer out. Since the wort is dark, you can't see it, so it can be kind of tedious. I then slowly lift the bag out of the pot, let it drip, and then lift out more, let it drip more until it's all out and a lot of the liquid has dripped. Then I quickly lift the bag up higher and put the bag of grain in a steel milk crate on top of the kettle and then press down on the grain bag with the lid of my pot. It's my "poor man's pulley system."

 

I like to use one too. Leave it in there throughout the boil. Mine is also stainless steel and less that 1" high. No problems leaving it in.

 

I wouldn't get too worked up about adding grain and crush, on my first BIAB batch I added a ton of grain and double crushed and came way over on my OG. I recommend changing one variable at a time and dial it in. For your first batch, choose to double crush or add extra grain. BIAB will also be more affected by your water chemistry than extract, so that is another variable to work in once you've got the process down. Start simple then make small adjustments is my point. The fun thing for me is that there is always something to tinker with.

 

Yeah, I guess there would be no harm leaving it in throughout the boil.