Bottling bucket as HLT?

[sendkyleanemail]

I have been having great successes with my humble little system, but any grain bill over 15 pounds becomes problematic, as I don't have a big enough HLT. I end up mashing in more water than needed, because I can heat strike water in my BK, but all I have for a HLT is a two gallon pot.

The thinner (too thin) mashes are having undesirable impacts on not only my extraction efficiency, but also on my ability to control protolyeic/enzymatic balance which results in all sorts of interesting affects on my big beers. I have been having good luck working around this limitation but would like to address it without buying another full boil sized kettle...

So my first thought is to move away from my "on the fly" sparging to double batch sparging, wherein I would heat 2 gallons of water, then get another two going for a second batch sparge.

Trouble is, I am not sure if I can get 2 gallons up to 170F in the 10-15 minutes the first batch sparge would rest.

So my other thought was to use that 2 gallon pot to heat water to near boiling 2 gallons at a time, and put in into my bottling bucket. That would give me 6 gallons of sparge water, which would greatly improve my efficiency over using just 2 gallons.

All this is in reference to large grain bill
Beers. Anything 15lb or less I get 70% extraction, consistently. Above that I drop down to 60-65%.

Also, rice hulls seem to improve my large grain bill efficiency a significant amount.

Am I thinking right here about the use of the bottling bucket as a HLT? Any other suggestions?

 

[BrewerBear]

I don't think the bottling bucket would hold up to near boiling temps. You may use BK to get water up to temp, then use some to sparge and transfer some to the 2 gallon pot on low flame to hold temp.

 

[mabrungard]

I have used a bottling bucket in the past as my HLT, but I heat that water to only 180F and expect a heat loss. I don't think that it would survive holding near boiling water.

You are better off getting a bigger pot so that you can heat all the water to a more modest 170 to 180F and then you can store it temporarily in the bottling bucket for metering into the mash.

 

[sendkyleanemail]

I guess I just need to buy another cooler, eh? That would be cheaper than another kettle and I could set it up for fly sparging.

 

[wilserbrewer]

Since you are HLT challenged, how about cold sparging the last batch sparge? I only mention this in that guys here have done pretty thorough testing and determined that cold sparging works without negative effects....try a search on cold sparging...YMMV, just a suggestion.

 

[younger96]

I have recently started using a bottling bucket as my HLT for fly sparging. I heat all the sparge water in my BK, transfer to the bottling bucket and start the sparge. It holds heat really well actually. I put a plastic fermenter cover on mine (with hole). I did a 45 min fly sparge the other day and the water temp only dropped about 5 degrees during that time. If you wrapped the bucket in a blanket or something you could probably hold a constant temp for some time.