Brewing Half of a Double Batch?

[shataway]

Hello all!

My goal is to fill two corny kegs from a single batch. I am limited by my boil kettle (turkey fryer) to roughly 6 gallons. I am considering mashing and boiling to get 6 gallons of 1060 for example. Put 3 gallons in each fermenter bucket and top off each with 2 gallons to get 10 gallons of 1040. I plan to use Beersmith to compensate the hop usage. Any thoughts?

The only downside that I can think of would be a "darker" beer but that does not concern me.

Thanks,
Steven

 

[david_42]

No different from boiling 3 gallons for a 5 gallon batch. It will waste a fair amount of the sugars though, since you can't sparge much. Maybe a parti-gyle would be better. This involves making a higher gravity beer out of the first runnings and a lower gravity beer out of the rest.

A third alternative would be to do two boils, a high gravity and a low gravity and split them both. The one boil could be short and wouldn't need any hop additions.

 

[shataway]

Thanks for the advice David.

Instead of topping up with water, I would be topping up with wort. How would I account for hops usage with this method? Any advice on how to manipulate Beersmith?

If I go with the partigyle method, I suppose I could take gravity measurements on the two batches and run beersmith on the fly to adjust hops in each.

After typing this, I realize my original goal is two have two kegs of the same beer which I was not clear on. By mixing the two, I will have the same but I just don't know how to make beersmith calculate it for me.

Thanks for the "beer for thought".

Steven