Am I Crazy...

[rigglet]

I'm getting ready to brew this again weekend. I've done 6 extract w/specialty grain brews so far. All have turned out great. I was thinking about venturing into all grain this weekend by trying BIAB with a single sparge. I'm still putting my grain bill together and finalizing my recipe, but before I get too far into that I thought I'd run my plan past the group.

I planned to bring 5 gallons of water up to strike temperature. I'd then add my grains and steep for 60 minutes. While that is going on I'd bring another 3.25 gallons up to mash out temperature in another kettle. After 60 minutes I'd remove the grain bag from the first kettle and "tea bag" it in the second kettle. Then I'd add the wort from the second kettle to my first kettle and start the boil and hops addition. The hope was to have a 6.5 gallon starting volume with about 5-5.25 gallon finished volume.

I'm using this method because my kettle doesn't quite have enough volume to hold all of the water that would be needed for a no sparge BIAB...and I'm hoping the sparge will increase my efficiency.

Thoughts? Input? I'm open for any suggestions/adjustments to this plan. If you don't think it will work I'll just go with another extract brew. I'm happy with those...I'm just looking to expand my horizons and move to the "next level" in brewing.

 

[topend]

It sort of depends on the size of your grain bill.

Palmer recommends 1.5 quarts per 1 pound of grain for mashing. As to sparge volume: "Sparging is the rinsing of the grain bed to extract as much of the sugars from the grain as possible without extracting mouth-puckering tannins from the grain husks. Typically, 1.5 times as much water is used for sparging as for mashing (e.g., 8 lbs. malt at 2 qt./lb. = 4 gallon mash, so 6 gallons of sparge water)."

If your boil kettle is not big enough to handle this volume, sometimes you have to do a longer boil and replace the lost water with additional wort.

Keep in mind you will have a temperature drop in your mash water when you immerse the grains. Papazian has a table on this in his book, if I had it in front of me I would replicate it for you.

 

[dantheman13]

There's some good BIAB spreadsheet tools over at http://www.biabrewer.info. These can help you determine your volumes. The registration process for the forums is a PIA though and is necessary to download the files!

 

[erikpete18]

BIAB is one of those things that can be done several different ways. I know some people do full volume mashing (~6 gal) without the sparge and get good results, so I don't see why adding a sparge would hurt. I prefer to still mash at around 1.25 qt/lb and single sparge with about the same volume I started with, but that's just because I've got a pretty small pot to boil in.

For your volumes, I think most people figure losing about 0.2 gal/lb of grain to absorption. BIAB might be able to get a little more water out of the grain if you are planning on squeezing your bag, but that might give you an idea of what you can lose. If this if the first time, I'd aim for a slightly lower volume since I figure its always easier to add a little water at the end than it is to boil longer to get it down to the volume you want.

Also, if its possible when you sparge, I get a lot better sparging done if I open the bag up, stir it around in the sparge water, and let it sit for 10-15 min. before pulling the bag out a second time.

 

[Haputanlas]

This will work fine. It's what I currently do with my setup and my beers are fantastic IMO

Anyways, it may seem kind of hectic at first, but once you get the hang of it, you'll be happy with BIAB.

 

[viking73]

Check out deathbrewer's sticky.

 

[rigglet]

Quick update on this. I brewed a honey wheat this weekend using the method I described. My water amounts were slightly different. I used 3 gallons for the initial mash and 4.25 gallons for the sparge with 9.5 lbs. of grain. Everything went really well. Target OG per the recipe was 1.035-1.055. I ended up a almost right in the middle at 1.048. Brew is bubbling away nicely this morning.

A couple of things I noticed with doing all grain versus extract (these are probably obvious for more experienced all grain brewers).

1. It is a lot longer brew day. With extract it took about 2-2.5 hours from start to cleanup. Yesterday's all grain day was nearly 5 hours.

2. I can now see the reason for the "filtering" posts. Looks like I'll have significantly more trub in this batch than I've every experienced with extracts. I used irish moss, but beer was still very cloudy going into the primary.

All in all it was a great day and I'm looking forward to seeing the difference in the two brewing methods.

Thanks to everyone for their help and advice. This is a great forum! :rockin:

 

[viking73]

Don't worry about the cloudyness. It'll drop out, at least mine usually does!

 

[SPR-GRN]

Glad it worked out for you man, AG felt like a big step to me when I made it, but the brew was amazing!

As for how long the brew day is, I didn't notice as much a change as you did, but my typical brew day when I do PM is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4hrs, AG is 4-5hrs, but I drink... a lot... when I brew... I thought it was a rule? Charlie Papazian says "relax, have a homebrew" about a million times during the process, so I try to adhere to his strict policy about relaxing and drinking plenty of homebrew