Kitchen Brewing Q

I got my bro in law the NB starter set deal for Black Friday. He lives in an apt. I always used an outdoor burner, with full wort boil, but he can't. Should I get him going BIAB or what is the best option for a basic 5g kettle on an indoor electric range. Thx.

 

Sounds like he'll be doing a 3 gallon boil with extract and then top-off water.

 

There's no problem doing the 3 gallon route. Best practice seems to be to do the boil using half (or less) of the extract at the beginning of the boil and only add the remainder with 10 or 15 minutes left. This does a couple of things including reducing the chance of scorching and darkening the wort. Also I believe hop utulization is reduced in a very high gravity wort, so starting with only part of the extract helps.

Michael

 

Is your buddy ready to do all grain brewing? Does he have the space to store 5 gallons of beer from an extract kit at a time or would BIAB half size batches be better for him. How much does he drink (can he keep up with demand doing half size batches)? I he willing to work with a kit or does he want to formulate his own recipes?

 

This is probably his best option for now.

 

A BIAB setup would let him go all grain on the stove top. Most beginning brewers don't leap immediately into all grain, but it's a simple upgrade. If he's getting a 7 gallon or larger pot, he should be able to handle a full wort boil. If not, he can do a 2.5-3 gallon boil and then use top off water to bring the batch up to 5 gallons. There's no harm in doing that and it's what most extract and partial mash kits assume is going on.

If the kit doesn't come with it, I would advise getting a good quality meat or candy thermometer for him. I have a nice one with a long 24" probe that clips to the side of my brew pot.

 

Lok at deatbrewers partial mash BIAB thread here. http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/easy-partial-mash-brewing-pics-75231/

It is an easy way to brew in the kitchen. He probably will only be able to boil 3 gallons or so, but it is very doable. I would have him check how much he can easily boil before actually doing a brew.

I use that method when I want to brew and the weather is really bad. Works great.

 

I've done everything from all extract to biab partial mash in the same 5G SSBK on the same stove. All partial boils of 2.5-3 gallons. Works even better with the aftermarket heating elements for the elec stove I got on amazon. They heat up faster.

 

I do extract brewing on the kitchen stove and find there's two problems.
1) If I try to do a full boil in one pot, I get some scorching that leaves a burnt taste in the final product.
2) If I do a partial boil and add water in the bucket, I get what I think is the "extract twang" flavor often mentioned on the forum.
Additionally, it's hard to boil 5 gallons on the electric stove top and you end up losing a lot to evaporation anyway.

So, I've found the following acceptable solution. Since all of the extract does not need to boil a full 60 minutes, I do 1-2 lbs in about 3.5 gallons of water in my 5 gallon stainless steel pot (leaves room for hops and avoids boilover). While that's going, I dissolve the remaining extract in a 3 gallon pot with the remaining water (what would have been my "top off" water). I boil this pot for 10 minutes near the end of the 60 minute boil. I add as much of it as possible to the bigger "main" pot for cool down.

Even so, I still end up about 1/2 gallon short, so the night before, I fill a clean, sanitized growler with filtered, boiled water and put it in the fridge. I use only this amount for top off to minimize "twang", and it also helps to bring down the temperature during cool down.

This method eliminates scorching, twang and let's me get a good boil going on the stovetop. It can get a little hectic and silly looking when I'm rotating pots around burners (I keep a 3rd smaller pot going to boil small amounts of water), but I'm satisfied with the results.

 

Extract twang,or mailard reactions come from adding all the extract at the beigining of the boil. It doesn't matter if it's in the same pot or not.
And adding top off water doesn't make extract twang. Again,the twang & darkening is from mailard reactions in the boil. Never in the fermenter. It doesn't work that way.

 

Thanks union, sorry to derail the thread but why do I find that my beers with larger amounts of top off water (1 gallon or more) don't taste as good?

Honestly, I wasn't sure I was getting extract twang, but there is something about the taste of those beers that is "off" that I've never been able to describe, so I (apparently incorrectly) assumed it was extract twang.

I discovered that if I did smaller batches, where all of the water was in the boil, I ended up with a better beer, which led me to believe that topping off was causing my problems. I've also seen some posts that led me to this belief.

 

There are those that insist that a full boil is better. But I don't believe that myself. Many kits & recipies are for a partial boil. Just reading through the instyructions will make that readilly apparent. I think good beer can be made either way with a good process. Look at my recipies for how I make partial boils work. I even made a partial mash midwest cascade pale ale kit by the same method & it turned out great. So it's more good process then brewing style. Any style of brewing can be messed up.