How much grain for a mini-mash

[rickprice407]

Up until now I hav done either extract kits with steeped grains or all grain recipes. Earlier this year we switched to an electric system out of Germany, the BrauMeister. Excellent mash efficiency (70-80%), little or no sparging due to constant water flow during the mash, and easy cleanup. Essentially no issues - until now.

My son and I want to do some big barleywines for Christmas 2013 and some big stouts and belgians for winter. Problem - mash pipe on the Braumeister is limited to maybe 22 lbs plus or minus and some of these beers have grain bills in the 30 - 40+ lb range. I realize that I'll be doing a mini-mash here but have a question - how much grain vs how much extract should I use? I'm assuming also that I would mash the non-base malts in favor of the base malt and use extract as needed for the base.

Or do I use extract only for the base malt and just steep the other grains? Using a conversion factor of .75 for the liquid extract and .6 for the dry.

Another question we had dealt with hops too. We'll be doing a full 10 gallon+ boil as opposed to the smaller boils used in lots of extract/minimash brewing. Is any hops increase needed as we should be able to get the expected hops utilization from the full size boil - or so I was thinking.

Gonna try some of these in about 3 weeks so any help any of you guys can offer will help me get ready.

Thanks,

Rick near Atlanta
10 gallons of Octoberfest and 10 of a Wee Heavy fermenting from last Saturday's brew. Freezer smells like a giant alcoholic bananna! Got the Strong Belgian, Mango Belgian and the Choc/Strawberry and Choc/Cranberry stouts aging in the bottles.

 

[amandabab]

when I convert
I replace 3lbs of DME extract with 4.5lbs of base malt. 2 row as a standard, marris otter for english stuff.

I replace 3lbs of amber DME extract with 4.5lbs of base malt and 2oz 40-60 cyrstal.
I replace 3lbs of dark DME extract with 4.5lbs of base malt and 2oz chocolate.

this is easy to do in a small mash tun and just add any other specialty grains in, more than enough diastatic power.

so the other way, subtract 4.5lbs grain and 2oz of the specialty grains needed and add 3lbs of the desired extract

 

[Yooper]

The easiest way to do that would be to figure the highest OG you're going to get with your system by maxing out the grain. Then just add light DME to get up to your difference.

Light dry extract will give you .009 points per pound, in a 5 gallon batch. So say you could only get 1.080 with your system and you wanted 1.100. You'd need 21 "points". That would be 2.5 pounds of DME.

 

[Wig]

well, you just can't mini-mash anything. some grains need some base malt mashed with it to help convert it. however if you mean steep, then you can use extract for the base and steep the specialty grain, which is very common.

However, to basically answer your question (with my methodology), I use as much grain as possible. Then do a little math to figure out how much you are missing your target gravity by and add DME in the kettle.

My older system couldn't handle the big beers, so i usually do what amandabab says. I would fill my 5 gallon tun with all the specialty grains and pale malt and water to reach 4.5 gallons (I never felt comfortable going all the way to the top of my tun). Then just to the math and load the kettle with DME.

I.e. I have a scoth ale that uses 15 pounds of grain. I know I can only fit 11.5 pounds of grain at a 1.25qt:1 pound in my tun (to my comfort level). So I'd max it and calculate the DME needed to cover the other 3.5 pounds of grain.

Make sense and help? I hope so.