High-gravity brewing ?

Singleinfusion208 · Sep 23, 2017

Hello I am trying to figure out how to brew this barley wine. But with 26lbs of 2-row malt even if I use 1qt/lb that put me at over 8gallons total in my 10gal mash-tun cooler I would rather divide up 26lbs an replace it with some DME. But how Would I incorporate the DME into brewing this beer?

Transamguy77 · Sep 23, 2017

If you have 8 gallons in a 10 gallon tun what is the problem? If you are going to add DME I would add it at the end of the boil.

day_trippr · Sep 24, 2017

Agree on both counts.

fwiw, the Green Bay Rackers "Can I Mash It" calculator says 26 pounds at 1 qt/per amounts to 8.58 gallons.
I've done 28 pounds in a 10 gallon Rubbermaid MLT - once

Cheers!

mattdee1 · Sep 25, 2017

To go on a slight tangent, in designing your recipe, did you take into account the efficiency drop you will see with a beer that big?

For example, if you’re using a tool like Beersmith for recipe design, and you’ve got it dialed in to work well with your setup to provide accurate OG predictions for 1.060ish beers, then you'll probably be quite surprised/disappointed with your OG on a barley wine if you don't adjust the software settings for the big beer.

Ways around this problem include:

- Design recipes that assume a lower efficiency (which means more grain will be needed to hit target OG)
- Sparge enough to get a pre-boil volume MUCH larger than you think you need, then boil for 2-3 hours to get your target volume into the fermentor
- Offset the efficiency loss with DME in the boil (not my preferred solution, personally)

Chanoc · Sep 25, 2017

Could you not perform two smaller batches...
I know, Iknow...
Double the time...
But is it not double the fun?
Then you only need to wash the equipment once...
Other way to boost efficiency is using first runnings for the big beer...
And second runnings for smaller beer...
This has been discussed in the past...
HTH.
Chanoc.

RM-MN · Sep 26, 2017

Singleinfusion208 said:
Hello I am trying to figure out how to brew this barley wine. But with 26lbs of 2-row malt even if I use 1qt/lb that put me at over 8gallons total in my 10gal mash-tun cooler I would rather divide up 26lbs an replace it with some DME. But how Would I incorporate the DME into brewing this beer?

When you can't fit in all the grain that the recipe calls for you check the presumed efficiency that the recipe is designed for and then improve your efficiency so you can use less grain. Since efficiency is tied pretty closely to the crush of the grain, you can crush finer and improve the efficiency if you have your own mill and your system can deal with the finer crush. That finer crush can be somewhat accommodated by adding rice hulls to help with the filtering or the problem of clogging can be eliminated by lining your mash tun with a filter bag that can be lifted to increase the filter area, much like BIAB except you do your mash in the tun.