AG adding water after the boil?

[amcclai7]

I am an extract brewer ready to make the jump to all grain brewing. I have done much research and think I have a pretty good method cooked up. The one thing that troubles me is that all I have read about AG brewing says that you must boil the entire volume of liquid (as opposed to to about half of the final volume that I do with extract beers) but I have never seen a definitive reason as to why this is the case. This is troubling because I have been adding several gallons of cold water to my wort after the boil in order to quickly reach appropriate yeast pitching temps and have had great results.

Several questions:
1. Is there a specific reason all the water must be boiled? Is it necessary for full starch conversion? or is it just that between mashing and sparging the full volume is inevitably already being used?
2. If there is no way around needing a wort chiller is it possible to fashion (as opposed to buy) one. Money is an issue.

Thanks for any replies!

 

[DrJerryrigger]

You can extract more sugars from the grain with more water, so you might as well use all of it. I guess you don't need to boil all of it, but you really should for sanitation.

 

[Barkingshins]

The way I see it, there is basically one reason why a full boil is highly recommended, if not necessary, with all-grain brewing.

Most AG brewers run all of the batch's water through their grains in an effort to rinse out as much of that sugary goodness as possible. If a significant portion of your eventual wort has never even seen the inside of your mash/lauter tun, you will be leaving a lot of fermentables behind and your efficiency will be terrible. You will not hit your target starting gravities with this method unless you anticipate the low efficiency and adjust your grain bill accordingly.

There may be other reasons as well and I will leave it to more experienced brewers to mention them if they exist.

 

[amcclai7]

Thanks for the replies and keep them coming. I really want to learn everything I can about AG before starting in on it. The method I am going to try is described below. I talked it over with a friend and he seemed to think it would work. If instead of using all the water for mashing as he says, if I only used half would this result in a watered down mess?

-Take all the brewing water (5.5/6 gal for a 5 gal batch) put it in the brew kettle with all your grain.
-mash for an hr on open flame at proper temps.
-pour into empty fermenting bucket lined with a very large grain bag
-pull the grain bag out and pour liquid back into the brew kettle, commence boil
-allow grain bag to sit on top of upside down colander fro 10-15min and add resulting liquid to the boil.

The more I think about this the more I realize I may just have to break down and buy or fashion a wort chiller. Just wanted to get everyone's input.

 

[FScholle]

Why not keep the grain in your grain bag right away? That way you will just have to take it out of your boil kettle. Let the bag drain as much as possible either directly into the boil kettle or into a separate pot and then add that back to your boil kettle. This way you won't have to transfer your entire amount of wort from boil kettle to bucket, back to boil kettle.

Look up BIAB or brew in a bag for more info.

F

 

[solbes]

I agree with ^^^, you are pretty much describing a BIAB process, which rocks. Just in the wrong order. Go to the BIAB sticky and read that.

I would make sure your boil kettle has at least 7-8 gallon capacity, get a 5 gallon paint strainer bag from Lowes, HD, Fleet Farm, etc. You mash to a certain grist ratio: quarts of water per lb of grain. For my setup it's about 1.6. After the mash is done, you raise the grain w/ bag and dunk sparge in a separate kettle (about 1.5 gallons of water for 10 minutes). Then you raise the grain above thte boil kettle again (I use a pulley to hold it there). Get as much wort out as possible (combo of draining time and squeezing it). Combine the sparge water and your off.

You should end up with your 6-6.5 gallons (to account for boil off to hit 5.5). Then you WILL need an immersion chiller. If you have the above mentioned kettles, all you need is a $2.50 strainer bag and about $35 worth of supplies to make a copper immersion kettle. I made mine from 25 feet of 1/2 soft copper, some vinyl tubing, 2 hose clamps, and a sink connector. Lots of DIY threads out there for this. With the price of LME extracts going up, you will recoup your costs pretty quickly.

 

[jetmac]

There are a few reason's to boil your wort. These are the same reason's wheather it's all-grain or extract. I have never extract brewed. The main reason for boiling is to concentrate your wort. I'd say, if you can boil the full 60-90 min and not boil away your wort completley and monitor the gravity, I would see no problem with adding cooled sterilized water to top up your carboy. If you have had success doing it this way with extract then there should be no problem doing it with all-grain. After all, isn't extract made from all-grain mash?

Have you thought of doing a "no sparge" method? This might help get enough fermentables in your kettle at the volume you want

Give your process a shot and see how it turn's out.

You may try filling up a bath tub with ice water, then stick your whole kettle in the tub of ice water at flame out and stir vigorously. Not everyone has a wort chiller.

 

[tugbucket]

I'm about to do my first AG hopefully this weekend. I also looked at several instructions for making a chiller. After pricing out the parts for it, adding in tax, time and gas, I would have saved about $5 over just buying a pre-made one. I got one off eBay for $51 shipped. I thought that seemed like I could make one cheaper but I think it would have been about $45 all together.

The last batch I brewed (partial boil) I bought 3 bags of ice (almost $8) to cool it in my sink. I don't have enough room in my freezer to make enough. So in what, 6-7 times I use the chiller, it's paid for.

 

[Barnstormer]

I made my own wort chilled. 25 ft of copper tubing, some clear siphon tubing and a few hose clamps for just under $20 from the hardware store.

 

[xenophobe2020]

to answer your first question, yes, its a full boil by nature because of the amount of water required to obtain a good efficiency on your mash. That said; due to constraints i have with my brewpot & electric stove, ive been splitting my mash into two separate boils i hop/boil for 60min, then just boil the rest 15-20 min to sterilize. This isnt the most efficient operation in the world but it works for me while i upgrade equipment. Also, I've read that boiling the entire volume with the hops supposedly aids in utilizing the hops to their fullest bittering potential, I feel like maybe I've read people disputing this though? This is a non-issue to me because in all of the partial boil batches I did with topoff water I never felt as though I had a problem with getting good results with normal amounts of hops

As far as chilling goes, there's plenty of people that don't chill their wort and achieve fine results. Ive been chilling my two batches separately in my sink in an ice water bath, while the second portion boils, i chill the first. Again not the most effective way to do things but its working for the time being... for what its worth I hate the idea of the water waste during the use of an immersion chiller, I know some of the water can be reused for cleaning & sanitizing but it still seems wasteful. I'm exploring cost effective, not overly complicated, ways to chill and also thinking about just going no chill.....

 

[jetmac]

xenophobe2020 brings up a good point.

Have you explored "no chill" brewing?

You can read about it here

 

[gclunde]

Easiest way I've found to chill wort (assuming you need to add some water to bring it up to your desired volume)...sanitize a gallon bucket, fill it with sterilized water, cover, freeze...then when chilling your wort, remove the frozen mass from the gallon bucket and add to your wort...stir. I've used this process numerous times and as long as you are careful about sanitation (i.e. sanitize anything that will come into contact with the frozen water prior to placing in your wort), you should be fine. I normally dip my hands in no rinse sanitizer, tip the gallon bucket upside down to let the 'ice cube' slide out, and then place it in the wort.

Works like a charm...one of the guys that works at my LHBS told me about this simple process when we were talking about chilling wort. I do this all the time and have never had any issues.

 

[jetmac]

Easiest way I've found to chill wort (assuming you need to add some water to bring it up to your desired volume)...sanitize a gallon bucket, fill it with sterilized water, cover, freeze...then when chilling your wort, remove the frozen mass from the gallon bucket and add to your wort...stir. I've used this process numerous times and as long as you are careful about sanitation (i.e. sanitize anything that will come into contact with the frozen water prior to placing in your wort), you should be fine. I normally dip my hands in no rinse sanitizer, tip the gallon bucket upside down to let the 'ice cube' slide out, and then place it in the wort.

Works like a charm...one of the guys that works at my LHBS told me about this simple process when we were talking about chilling wort. I do this all the time and have never had any issues.

That's a cool idea

 

[amcclai7]

Why not keep the grain in your grain bag right away? ...
F

The method described I got off this website (can't find it right now but I'll post a link later) and he claimed to get 83% efficiency as well as another posted who tried it and got the same result. It was my assumption that having each bit of grain completely surrounded by the water, as opposed to having the bits in the middle of the bag surrounded by other grains, gave better efficiency. I could well be wrong though.

xenophobe2020, I have read that about hop utilization as well but in my previous brews i boiled about 2-2.5 gal with a normal hop schedule and topped of with cold water and everytime the bitterness was exactly what I expected. It seems to me that by doing what I've been doing you're just making a highly hopped wort and then diluting down to proper IBU's. Again though I could be wrong.

gclunde, That is the coolest idea I've ever heard! So for example I've been adding slightly over half of the final volume of ice cold water to the wort after it chills to about 160F then transferring to the fermenter in order to reach proper yeast temps. Are you saying that maybe I could boil 80% of the final volume and that 1 gallon chunk of ice will chill it to the proper temp? If so, that would be awesome. more water=more eff, and no need for a wort chiller. Also do you wait for the wort to cool to about 160 or so before throwing in the ice? Thanks!

 

[amartinez]

The method described I got off this website (can't find it right now but I'll post a link later) and he claimed to get 83% efficiency as well as another posted who tried it and got the same result. It was my assumption that having each bit of grain completely surrounded by the water, as opposed to having the bits in the middle of the bag surrounded by other grains, gave better efficiency. I could well be wrong though.

The way I do BIAB I just line the kettle with a bag and dough in like you normally would for AG. It's not bundling up the grain in a tight bag like you typically get your specialty grains when buying extract kits. The only thing you have to think about is keeping the bag off the bottom of the kettle if you're going to raise the temp to do a mash out, as your bag may burn and leave you with a big mess.

 

[amcclai7]

Solbes on the previous page said he used a 5 gallon paint strainer bag from lowes. Is that what you use?

 

[solbes]

I should point out that I get 80-82% with the grain in the bag from the start. So I don't think there is an efficiency loss from mashing in the bag. I also use a the turkey fryer basket with some stainless steel bolts to keep the bag up and off the botttom while heating for mash out. Very similar to the stickied BIAB thread at the top.

 

[amartinez]

Solbes on the previous page said he used a 5 gallon paint strainer bag from lowes. Is that what you use?

Yup, I got a two pack for I think around 4 bucks, so they're a great way to go if you're on a budget. I double bag mine, just to be safe, but so far I haven't had any issues with it.

I would imagine the turkey fryer basket helping but if you don't want to buy that you can get by without it just fine.

 

[Spintab]

for what its worth I hate the idea of the water waste during the use of an immersion chiller, I know some of the water can be reused for cleaning & sanitizing but it still seems wasteful.

Save ice from your fridge for several days prior to brewing. Use the sanitizing solution from your fermentation vessel, put it in your mash tun (you cleaned it out as soon as you were done sparging right ). Add your ice. Get yourself a cheap pond pump, stick it in the tun and pump the ice water through your chiller. If your mash tun is large enough (I use an igloo cube and it is) stick your kettle in the ice bath. Now you're pumping ice water through the chiller and the kettle is sitting in that same water. You'll probably have to add ice and drain water as the ice melts but you can save that and the remaining ice water to clean. Done right and your water loss is minimal.

 

[Spintab]

Have you explored "no chill" brewing?

You can read about it here

I'll give you a dollar if you can brew ten batches in a row like this and not spoil a single one.

 

[passedpawn]

I should point out that I get 80-82% with the grain in the bag from the start. So I don't think there is an efficiency loss from mashing in the bag. I also use a the turkey fryer basket with some stainless steel bolts to keep the bag up and off the botttom while heating for mash out. Very similar to the stickied BIAB thread at the top.

I don't believe this. Sorry, I know those are "arguing words", but it just isn't happening. Common sense says that you can't do that without sparging to recover sugars still in the grains. I'm guessing you aren't calculating efficiency correctly.

 

[solbes]

I use a dunk sparge in a second kettle at 170 for 10-15 minutes. I've confirmed this a few times. Calculated with a website which makes it pretty hard to screw up. Volumes, weights, and temp corrected hydrometer are spot on. Believe, or don't believe, its no skin off my back.

http://www.brewersfriend.com/brewhouse-efficiency/

If you haven't tried BIAB yet, give 'er a try. Then you can run the numbers yourself. I've seen the fancy fly sparge setups in action and I like them. I don't really have the desire to get a nice tier stand, an extra mash kettle, and perform the extra cleaning though. The downsides to BIAB over this setup are more trub transferred to BK, and an upper limit on how much grain I can mash in my 7.5 gall boil kettle.

 

[gclunde]

Easiest way I've found to chill wort (assuming you need to add some water to bring it up to your desired volume)...sanitize a gallon bucket, fill it with sterilized water, cover, freeze...then when chilling your wort, remove the frozen mass from the gallon bucket and add to your wort...stir.

That's a cool idea

Since another member asked a few questions about this, figured I would provide some additional information.

The '1-gallon bucket ice cube' process works great for getting the wort down to desired temps quickly. I typically brew 2.5-gallon or 3-gallon batches, so after doing a little cooling in an ice water bath, I add the '1-gallon bucket ice cube' to the boil pot and am able to quickly get temps down to pitching temps...it saves an awful lot of hassle and minimizes water waste during the cooling process.

FYI, it can take 24-48 hours for the '1-gallon bucket ice cube' to fully freeze, depending on the temp of the water when you put the bucket in the freezer.