How are big beers made?

How are big beers made from grain witout adding DME, LME or Sucrose etc. Extra boil? You can only go so thick with the mash?

Bigger mash. The more grain you have in your mash the more sugars you'll extract from the grain.

WBC said:

How are big beers made from grain witout adding DME, LME or Sucrose etc. Extra boil? You can only go so thick with the mash?

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TRY this link for info. http://byo.com/feature/1556.html

On Basic Brewing Radio, the head of Breiss malt Extract says alot of people in the brewing business use Extract to raise the gravity of their wort for bigger beers.

Sean

First thing you should get is a 500 gallon MLT like mine. You can make a REALLY BIG beer with it. Notice the size of it in relation to my 10 gallon MLT


View attachment newmashton[1].BMP

You can always double mash. Mash, drain, dump grains, replace with new grains, heat mash runoff back to mash strike temp, mash new grains with mash runoff. Haven't tried it, but it goes something like the above, one way to get high grav w/o huge mash tun or extra long boil. Or just boil first runnings w/o sparging -I've done that - you just get smaller volume obviously.

How big are you talking?

orfy said:

How big are you talking?

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I was thinking around a 7.7 Alc/vol. I want to make a Stone IPA clone at 12 gallons total. I can get about 25 pounds of grain in 1 thick mash so maybe 2 separate medium mashes would be better. My mashtun is a 10 gallon Rubbermaid.

Some common options would to sparge a little more and boil longer to concentrate the wort back down, or alternatively, increase the grainbill and sparge your normal amount and boil your normal length. For REALLY big beers, these methods become more difficult, so you can actually make a monster grainbill, and REDUCE your sparge (since the first runnings of a mash are always much higher in gravity). Combinations of the above might also work too.

Personally, if I were going really big, I would just add DME to keep things simple.

Boston said:

First thing you should get is a 500 gallon MLT like mine. You can make a REALLY BIG beer with it. Notice the size of it in relation to my 10 gallon MLT


View attachment 2621

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LOL, yep, that thar really is a big beer

That little mash tun looks a lot like a gatorade powder tin

WBC said:

I was thinking around a 7.7 Alc/vol. I want to make a Stone IPA clone at 12 gallons total. I can get about 25 pounds of grain in 1 thick mash so maybe 2 separate medium mashes would be better. My mashtun is a 10 gallon Rubbermaid.

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WBC, any way you can compact your sig a bit?

I was about to do a 10 gallon batch of Stone and the recipe would have called for 26 pounds. I have a 10-gallon rubbermaid too and thought that it would be a b!tch to try and work that volume, so I switched to an Anchor (23#) instead.

I'm tempted to go out to the garage and try to convert the family 48Qt cooler. If my manifold fits, that may the ticket next weekend.

The "repeat mash" sounds like and interesting concept. I wonder about the worts ability to continually absorb sugar.

landhoney said:

You can always double mash. Mash, drain, dump grains, replace with new grains, heat mash runoff back to mash strike temp, mash new grains with mash runoff. Haven't tried it, but it goes something like the above, one way to get high grav w/o huge mash tun or extra long boil. Or just boil first runnings w/o sparging -I've done that - you just get smaller volume obviously.

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Funny. I just read the chapter in "Radical Brewing" by Randy Mosher regarding this, and he suggested this same concept.

Either this, or to use DME since it's difficult hitting higher than 1.060 with just grain.

Professor Frink said:

That little mash tun looks a lot like a gatorade powder tin

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LOL, I wanted to see if I'd get any reactions by claiming to have a 500 gallon Rubbermade cooler MLT. My oldest daughter took the pic and she was laughing like hell.