Two Gallon BIAB Experiment - Dogfish 60

BIAB: Two-Gallon Batch of Dogfish 60 IPA All-Grain:

Equipment:

Required:
5 Gallon Pot – Available at Target (get the enamel one)
5 Gallon Paint Strainer – From Home Depot (they are next to the safety equipment)
2 Gallon Paint Bucket with Lid converted with airlock – From Home Depot
Digital/Analog Scale – Should be able to measure down to .1 oz accuracy
Digital Thermometer with Remote Probe – helpful to have max/min and set temp options
Beer Smith Software – Some free alternatives are available but Beer Smith is awesome and useful for converting future recipes (example: http://leebrewery.com/********.htm)
Hydrometer
Bottle Caps
Bottles (approximately 20)
Bottle Capper


Ingredients:

5.25 pounds Domestic two-row malt (buy it milled) (http://www.morebeer.com) *
.2 pounds Amber Malt (you can use pretty much any kind of amber)
.28 ounces Warrior (or Nugget) Hops (order in bulk or piecemeal online from http://www.hopsdirect.com/)
.2 ounces Amarillo Hops
.2 ounces Simcoe Hops

Dry hop:
.3 oz Amarillo
.3 oz Simcoe

Safale – US05 (order a couple of packets on morebeer or start culturing your own yeast) **

* You can buy grain in bulk and mill it as you go. A good option for a cheap grain mill would be a Corona Mill. Despite what many online have said and continue to say, a Corona Mill will do just fine for small batch brewing. In addition, with the BIAB technique, grain bed doesn’t matter in the least since we are artificially filtering with the grain bag. Also hops store for up to a year in the freezer. Plan your next 5 or 10 brews and then order in bulk. This will cut costs down to about 10 bucks for two gallons of brew or about $.50 per beer. This is a significant savings considering the fact that Dogfish 60 costs about 8 bucks for a six pack, while this recipe makes the same thing and costs $3. Recipes that have fewer hops will bring the cost down even further, as will harvesting yeast from bottles of your previous brew.

** You can culture yeast from your previous brews by making a yeast starter. Get some Goya Malta (latino food store). Carefully pour out one of your old brews so just an ounce or so is remaining with the yeast sediment on the bottom. Then mix 6 oz of Malta with 4.5 oz of water (making a 1.040 solution) in a Mason jar. Swirl your remaining beer around to get the yeast in suspension and pour it in the Malta, shake vigorously. Put it in a warm place for a day or two with a piece of aluminum foil over top with just a hole or two in it. Once you see yeast on the bottom of the jar, decant the liquid carefully until just a little bit of it is covering the yeast. Then, when you are ready to pitch the yeast (put it in the sweet wort) just pour the slurry in.)

Preparation:

Heat your oven to about 160 degrees, put in your pizza stone if you have one to increase thermal mass. We want our mash (mixture of grain and water) to sit at 154 degrees for 70 minutes. Using the pizza stone in the oven will help to maintain this temperature.

Next heat 11 quarts of water in your 5 gallon pot to 164 degrees. We have to heat the water above our desired mash temperature to account for the thermal mass of the grain (5.45 pounds at 65 degrees). Put in your probe thermometer and stir the water occasionally. Once you hit 164 let the temperature stabilize for a minute or two, adjusting as necessary.

Put your paint strainer into the pot and drape the elastic band over the sides. Slowly add the grain to the pot, trying to avoid any clumps. Give it a couple of stirs, insert your probe thermometer, and put the lid on. Place the pot in the oven and set a timer for 70 minutes. Your temperature may start at about 156 or 155 but should drop to 154 in a few minutes. If it is significantly lower you can add a little boiling water and stir, or vice versa with cold water. Remember we are aiming for 154 ON AVERAGE. If it spends a few minutes at 156 or 153 it isn’t going to ruin your beer. The proper temperature range for the conversion of the starches in the grain to sugar is 148-156 or so. Mashing (holding the grain at a temperature) towards the lower end of that spectrum will produce a dry beer, while mashing at the higher end results in a more full-bodied beer.

At the end of the 70 minutes, put a towel on the floor and place the grain bag in a kitchen strainer over the pot. Allow the grain to drip back into the pot. You can squeeze the bag a bit to help things along but you shouldn’t really have to. Once you have extracted most of the liquid, just toss the bag in the sink for cleaning later. The spent grain makes great compost.

Place your pot on the stove and boil the sweet wort (liquid in pot) for 60 minutes. Add the Warrior hops continuously for the first 25 minutes then the Simcoe/Amarillo mixture for the remaining 35. Add ½ tsp of Irish Moss at 15 minutes remaining if it is available. If you don’t have Irish Moss it isn’t the end of the world, it just helps with clarity.

Fill your sink with cold water and ice. At the end of the boil, place the pot in your sink and cool it as quickly as possible by agitating the water. You can drain the water as it warms, but be careful not to introduce any water into the wort. Once the wort has reached pitching temperature (75-85 degrees), run your wort through a sterilized strainer into your 2 gallon paint bucket (fermenter). Pour a sample of your wort into a long stem pilsner glass to measure the specific gravity with your hydrometer. Spin your hydrometer to get rid of any bubbles and record this number (should be between 1.065-1.075 or so).

Find a place in your house that is between 65-70 degrees, put a little water in your airlock, and wait about 48 hours. You should see bubbles coming out of your airlock in less than 12 hours. After two days, introduce your .6 ounces of dry hops (you can use a nylon bag if you like or just throw them in).

After two weeks you should have delicious beer that is ready for bottling. You should use about 1.5 ounces of sugar to bottle.

 

This looks like a pretty good method. I really like the pizza stone idea. I wonder why no one else has commented on this.
Thoughts?

 

I have recently started using this exact same method with 3.25 gallon batches, which produce exactly 24-12oz beers. I have rigged up a dorm fridge with a temperature controller and am using two 3 gallon Better Bottles. I couldn’t be happier. It allows me to try a lot of new styles, brew more often, and produce really quality beers.

The only part of BiAB that people seem to take issue with is the grain to water ratio. I understand the argument, but for 95% of beers, it doesn’t really apply. Personally, I have been consistently at 70-72% efficiency as long as I stay within 150-156. Going much above or below that would probably hurt conversion efficiency, but again I haven’t tried it.

As to why this post seems to be so unpopular. A lot of brewers think that good beer has to be hard to make. This couldn’t be less true. Rather, having a firm understanding of the process itself allows pretty much anyone to make award-winning beer using a minimum of equipment.

I have improved on my process by recirculating the wort during mashout with my March pump. While it is an extra step and outside of the BiAB ethos, I provides me with a more refined process (i.e. I know that I have recirculated for 10 minutes after mashing while bumping the temp up to 180 or so).

 

Gonna see if I can do this method myself

 

Bad beer is hard to make. LOL