BIAB Brewing (with pics)

I stir at the beginning when I dough in...and I stir at the end when I mash out. in between, I'm normally not even home. there's a lot that I can get done in 90 minutes

 

I like the nap idea. 90 min mash makes for a long brew day and I usually drink beer during it so it can become a pretty drunk brewing day with many mishaps.

 

That is awesome thinking. I have the same stand and it never occurred to me to use it that way.

 

Nicely done, just played with that. Will give it a try this weekend.

 

I'm with you on that. I've cut back to no beer before the boil starts. Seems to make things go a little smoother.

 

Okay so my first biab happened over the weekend. I know that what I am about to write will make many of you shake your heads but I take full responsibility for my irresponsibility. I have about about a dozen extract with mini mash brews under my belt but like many with this strange addiction my significant other told me she wished it didn't smell so bad in the house when I was creating the elixir of my obsession. So off to Wally World I go to find a turkey fryer set up. Meanwhile I have been reading what a bunch of you had to say about biab and thought it was likely the answer to my desire for conversion to all grain. Had the wife make a 2x3 bag of voile and purchased a kit for bourbon porter which might have been an aggressive choice for a start.
When brew day started on Sunday I already had several projects that were distracting me but I got 4 gallons of water to 160 and put the grain in the bag. Stirred it up real good and put 2 towels around the kettle and covered it with a warm jacket of mine. 90 minutes later it the temp had not moved from 152 degrees. Mashed out at 170 for 10 minutes. Then did a dunk sparge in about 1.5 gallons of water and did not do much squeezing. Boil went for 60 minutes, cooled with my redneck wort chiller and I was ready for the fermenter. I did add a about 1.5 gallons to the fermenter to achieve 5 gallons pitched the yeast and locked her down. Bubbled pretty good over night but was quieting down about 15 hours later, looks and smells like beer is happening.
Don’t know my efficiency and at this stage I don’t care. I am sure I made beer and I will drink it with a smile. Yes I know I should have _________ add whatever you like, but I did get a feel for how this works and decided that I would brew a session beer to work on my technique.
Thanks to all of you for your comments and advice, would never have discovered it without you. BIAB rocks.

 

you just made beer from grain! what would I add? nothing. if it works for you then that's all that really matters. Although taking gravity readings will a allow you to know things like efficiency, ABV%, and other things needed to repeat the recipe in the future. They still don't take away from the fact that you just made beer!

 

Agreed! I brewed extract for a year before I started taking gravity readings. I always made beer! Your off to a great start! BIAB is awesome!

 

Did my first BIAB this past x-mas eve, normally we did extract. I have a 20 gallon and filled my pot with 7.5 gallons pre-boil and after we were done I only ended up with around 3 gallons of beer. I had to add 2 gallons of water which I want to avoid.
so for all of the rest of you out there, that 11 lb grain seems to soak up a lot of water, plus evaporation is rough over the 60 min boil too. Keep in mind, my pot is like 20" wide so I lose more water than some skinnier taller pots.

just thought i'd share... Wont know how it tastes for 3 months as we brewed an oatey stout, so it will be sitting longer.

 

squeeze the grain bag and you'll recover a lot of the water that was absorbed.
use this formula to determine the amount of water needed.
batch size + absorption + boil off +trub loss = water needed.
use this formula to determine absorption

grain weight in lbs * .06 = absorption. you can of course adjust the number depending on how much or how little you squeeze. Remember it's OK to squeeze the bag. You won't extract tannins.

 

Yea that's how it goes w/ a 20 gallon pot for a five gallon batch, lucky you got 3 gallons and not just a stain at the bottom of the kettle...haha cheers!

 

I did a 5 gallon batch last weekend. 10# grain in a 15 gallon pot. I started with just under 8 gallons of water, squeezed the bag pretty good, and ended up with about 5.5 gallons in the fermenter. I need to record my pre- boil volume next time so I have a better idea about what my absorption and boil off volumes are.

 

I posted a review of a cheap (but great) BIAB bag from More Beer here:
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/29-x29-morebeer-biab-bag-5-50-a-376435/

 

nice price for a bag. not as fine weave as voile but it'll get ya started. as far as trub in kettle/primary. don't worry about it

 

I never do. I dump almost everything in and don't really fuss with siphoning. I do not secondary either. I cold crash

 

What do you mean by this?

Grain absorbs same amount of water regardless of pot size lol

 

It's more to do with pot geometry and pot volume than the grain absorption. In a wide mouth 20 gal pot, 5 gal of wort has a pretty high surface area to volume ratio and that will mean a lot of boil off.

I did a 2.5 gal batch this summer and instead of going back to my old 6 gallon pot for it I decided to go ahead and use my new 10.5 gal pot. I think I was lucky to wind up with about 1.75 gallons in the end.

 

I'm new at this, but if you do some boiling trial runs, you can get a good idea of how much you'll boil off, then it won't matter what pot size you use.

Using the previously mentioned formula for a 2.5 gallon batch:

, I started with 4 1/2~3/4 gallons of water, and have ~ 2.7 gallons in my fermentation bucket now.

 

Interesting thread. I think BIAB is a good go between from extract/partial extract brewing to all grain tri-keggle system.

For the sake of argument. Is there any advantages or disadvantages between sparging the grain bag with a gallon of water on a 10 gallon batch? Is the sparge necessary or would it be a silly extra step that really did not matter?

 

I would disagree with calling it a go between. After a dozen or so BIAB batches I see no reason compelling me to go to the classic 3 vessel system.

To your question though, I think you'll find a pretty good split. There's been some research saying that the sparge adds so little that the extra effort isn't worth it. I do a sparge but I haven't done anything empirical yet to say whether I'm getting a few extra points or not. My main reason for doing it is volume though. Keeping that gallon out of the mash and reserving it for the sparge makes me more comfortable with the room in my pot. Depending on the grain bill, I've come very close to the rim if I try to put all of the water in from the start.

 

Interesting point Spaceman. And from what I have read about this type of brewing it really does not matter if the grain bag gets squeezed or not. Many people (with more experience then me) have said that by squeezing the grain bag does not necessary mean adding additional tannins to the overall flavor of the brew. is this true of false?

 

squeezing the bag does NOT add tannins. think about the sheer weight of grains alone at a mega brewery pressing down on the grain bed. no tannins are extracted by that and that's WAY more pressure than you'll ever put on the bag. tannins are extracted by mainly the PH. With BIAB you never reach the PH needed to extract tannins.

 

Sweet, now I am convinced... However one-day I hope to build a brutus 10. BIAB will do well for me till then. One day I hope to brew more then 10 or 15 gallon batches.

 

We all have goals!

I daydream of a 1bbl Kal clone!

 

I hope only to perfect BIAB and have no desire to make things more complicated. Just did my second batch 75% efficiency with water volume only off by .75 gallon. So easy I love it.

 

I did up a 14# grain bill stout today. Estimated efficiency was over 82% for the second time! BIAB is amazing! I brewed with a buddy today and the both of us are figuring out a how to get the bag squeezed efficiently to get close to 90%. Does anyone have a spare boa constrictor?

 

While your experience may vary, I have been keeping track of pre-squeeze vs post-squeeze gravity readings over the past 2 years. I have concluded that squeezing adds nothing but volume; you will not gain any measurable increase in pre-boil gravity by squeezing the bag. As such, I have stopped trying to squeeze every last drop out of the bag and instead simply adjusted my water voulmes to give me correct pre-boil volume with a gentle squeeze and a few minutes of draining over the pot. Note: I do not sparge the bag and cannot speak for any increase in gravity experienced by those that do employ that method.

OTOH, these same measurements I have been tracking DO show a gravity increase of 3-4 points by doing a proper mashout. Again, YMMV so it's best to test and conclude for yourself.

 

Cool results. Squeezing is kind of a pain especially since I always seem to end up with burnt hands. I use a bucket with holes drilled in the bottom sitting in another bucket. I sparge over this and then also squeeze the bag in the bucket. I use a pot lid but it gets hot and a lot of liquid likes to climb the sides rather than going down the holes. Wouldn't mind skipping that process if all it took was another half gallon of water with no significant losses. Something I need to check out.

The biggest boost in efficiency I got was tightening my mill gap. I went from high 60's to high 70's once I took the gap down to .030".

 

Squeezing shouldn't change the pre-boil gravity. All you are doing with squeezing is getting more the same wort that is in the kettle off (not out of) the grain. Squeezing will increase volume, as you said, but it also increases efficiency. If you are able to get 10% more volume by squeezing, that means 10% more sugar, and a corresponding increase in efficiency.

I mashout, and I squeeze. When I squeeze, I put a wire rack from a fridge over the kettle, while letting the bag drip. Then I put a colander on the rack and use a 1/2 gallon empty growler to squeeze. No burnt hands (did enough of that when I started.) Then I put the bag in a big pot, and pour anything that seeps out into the kettle as it reach boil.

All of that said, I am not sure how much more I get this way vs. just suspending the bag over the kettle for the time it takes to reach boil. Since I don't find it hard to squeeze, I probably will continue to do it. Someday, I may decide to check by just letting the grain drip into the kettle until it reaches boil, and then squeezing it into a separate pot to see how much extra I could have gotten.

BIAB is great. It got me away from partial mashes to all grain, and I won't go back!

 

I've actually been thinking about using a fruit press. Chuck the bag into the press and go to town.

 

I have never seen this machine before. Is there a link? Is it the absolute largest batch a person can produce with BIAB?

 

just google search it. Honestly, if you need to make more than 52 gallons (200 liters) at once, then you really need to step up to pro equipment.

 

So BIAB is never used in a commercial setting like a micro-brew establishment. How do the Aussies set up their micro-brews, by the american mash-tun, lauter-tun systems?

 

lol.. the Germans were making beer with a mash/lauter setup LONG before the Americans. Remember, brewing has been around for thousands of years. BIAB is simply a method of all grain brewing created by aussies for homebrewing beer. Its a low cost alternative to a traditional 3 vessel setup. i would imagine their micro breweries are just like any micro brewery world wide

 

So the it only for the homebrewers like myself. I have only read through about half of this thread and I understand any thing more then a 20 gallon (10 gallon batch size) is no really viable, possibly because of the weight of the grains. So what is the most grain that would be able to be placed in a kettle with out breaking the pulley system or having some sort of malfunction with the hardware or the wort?

 

Question: I have been doing BIAB for the last 6 months (10 batches or so) & now that its cold as hell outside in New England, I was wondering how to pull this off indoors. My thought was to do the mash in a 7 gallon pot I have with as much water as possible, then split the wort into 3-gal batches in two separate pots to boil on a stove top. What do I need to consider here? Would roughly splitting the hop additions work? I guess I'd need to consider the boil off from two separate vessels instead of one so may need to add water at some juncture of the process. Then just blend after the boil.

Half of me just says suck it up & brew outside to save the hassle, or just brew extract during the winter, but I'd hate to do that if there were alternatives. I don't mind the cold temps for the brewing part - its the cleaning in freezing water that's a bear!

Ideas?

 

"electric BIAB"

 

Edit: Most of the issue revolves around boiling & cleaning. How to boil & clean using two standard sized pots in a typical kitchen sink....

 

Or possibly stovetop assist w/ a heatstick will easily do a five gallon batch in a ten gallon pot. Or mash inside and boil outside to save some time out of the elements.

 

Fair enough. Split the boil on the stove top, cool and clean in the bathtub?