5 or 10G batches?

[showcow]

Hey guys.
I'm about to start building an electric system and really can't decide on three 20G blichmann kettles or three 10g ones. As it is now I have one of each and do about 75% 5-gallon batches and 25% 10-gallon.

The flexibility to do this isn't insanely important to me but it would be nice.

Question is: those of you with 20G kettles... Is it super annoying to do a 5-6 gallon batch in them?
Does the boil off rate change a lot (too high, or can't boil vigorously enough so hot break isn't as good)?
Since I'll almost always be doing 5 gallon batches should I just get 10g kettles?
How about the mash, would the grain bed be too wide on a lowish gravity 5-gallon batch in a 20G MLT?


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[iijakii]

Personally I wouldn't do 20 gallon kettles for primarily 5gal batches - there are other people who say differently though. Bet you wouldn't even be able to turn the element on until the 4-gal mark. Blegh.

If you want to stick with 5 gal batches do 10s. If you want the option to do a larger batch, go 15s. If you think you'd do 10gal batches almost entirely, go 20s.

 

[grainbill]

If you keg or plan to keg I would do the 15g kettles and brew 10 gal - 15 gal batches. I myself piggy back two, ten gal batches (my kettles are 13 gal). I haven't look at their kettles to see if you could get a good enough grain bed for 5 gal, but Bilchmann should be able to answer that one.

 

[showcow]

Personally I wouldn't do 20 gallon kettles for primarily 5gal batches - there are other people who say differently though. Bet you wouldn't even be able to turn the element on until the 4-gal mark. Blegh.

If you want to stick with 5 gal batches do 10s. If you want the option to do a larger batch, go 15s. If you think you'd do 10gal batches almost entirely, go 20s.

in the end, i decided to go with 10 gallon kettles for only 5-gallon batches.

Even with 15/15/15, that would mean BOTH 10G and 5G batches wouldn't be ideal (not enough room anyway for a 90-min boil on a 10G batch, 5G batches would be okay) - so I thought it best to go with the 10/10/10 setup. thanks guys!

I'm also going to mount the Camco 5500w ripple element in the same place Kal did - center of hole 4" from bottom of kettle. that way, i have flexibility for hop/trub filtering (right now I use a hop blocker, and it works okaaaaay). this means i could switch to a HopStopper if i wanted to. even mounting at this height, the element would be submerged about 5" from the bottom, which means i could turn the element on at the 3-gallon mark. Plus, with a 5500w element bringing only ~7 gallons of wort to boiling, it shouldn't take long at all

point is, this is another good reason to go with the 10-G kettles - I can mount the element high enough for any kind of strainer to fit, but also turn the element on within a reasonable liquid volume.