How much water?

[Gus G]

Hello,

I was wondering how much water I should use for BIAB?

I have 12.25 lb of grain. It’s a 16 gallon kettle. I will squeeze the bag after mash and draining.

It’s a milkshake neipa so I was maybe gonna shot for a 5.5 gallon batch because with raspberries and all the hop and trub may be some loss. I’m using brewers friend app and it says maybe 7.5 gallons?

Last time I used like about 7 and it came up low about 4.3 gallons.

Do you think in your experience it would be more like 8 to 8.5 gallons of water to start with at sparge for Biab if I wanna come up closer to 5.5?

There will be .25 oz hops in boil. 5 oz whirlpool and 5 oz dry hop. 6 lb frozen raspberries. 2 vanilla beans. 2 packs safale yeast.

Thank you!

 

[wilserbrewer]

Uh yea, try what you were short by “last time”....

So add 1.2 to your 7 gallons...
Say 8 gallons plus a quart

Did you add 6 lb frozen raspberries last time? That’s a lot of liquid also?

 

[Gus G]

Ok thanks. Last time wa different beer all together.

 

[wilserbrewer]

That’s 3 quarts of raspberries....but I have no idea how much of that volume will be beer and how much will be sludge in the fermenter...

Maybe guessing a 1/3 beer idk

 

[deadwolfbones]

The best water calc for BIAB is the one at Priceless Brewing. Give it a try!

 

[FlabbyRoach]

I use biabcalculator.com
Worked for last 2 years for me
I do a full volume mash usually some where around 7.5 to 7.75 gal

 

[Gus G]

Hey everyone thank you I used a few different calcs and went with 8.5 gallons. Ended up with 5


1.070 OG

 

[pricelessbrewing]

The best water calc for BIAB is the one at Priceless Brewing. Give it a try!

Thanks for the support! If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve it, or feature requests let me know.

Working on a complete rework that will have recipe formulation and fall under the "complete recipe builder" category but I'm still supporting my biab calc until I launch it!

 

[deadwolfbones]

Thanks for the support! If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve it, or feature requests let me know.

Working on a complete rework that will have recipe formulation and fall under the "complete recipe builder" category but I'm still supporting my biab calc until I launch it!

Great to hear it! I hope you'll still provide a standalone BIAB water calc because it's crucial to my workflow! (I use Beersmith for recipe formulation.) Definitely open to trying your recipe builder, though.

 

[soccerdad]

The math is simple but you have to do the math. Volume to fermenter + boil off + amount left in kettle + grain absorption + hops absorption = water needed. Some folks leave nothing in the kettle and some folks have little hops absorption (I.e., hops in a sock and wort squeezed out). You do need to know boil off and grain absorption
Priceless allows you to enter those in the calc

 

[pricelessbrewing]

Great to hear it! I hope you'll still provide a standalone BIAB water calc because it's crucial to my workflow! (I use Beersmith for recipe formulation.) Definitely open to trying your recipe builder, though.

No intention to remove the standalone biabcalc, but development may stagnant in favor of the complete recipe builder. You'll see a popup alert window on the biabcalc once the recipe builder is ready for testing/release.

 

[LostHopper]

I've used a number of the calculators (priceless is a probably my fav) which put me in the ballpark on water volumes but I've found that just brewing experience has helped the most. Brewing more batches allows you to get a feel for your different volumes along the way from squeezing the bag, any sparging, boil off, kettle trub (if any), fermenter trub. Once you have those number plus any recipe influences like your raspberries you get a feel for where you should start. Not a great answer, I know, but that's how things have evolved for me and I'm doing much better on final beer volume and gravity measurements.

 

[LittleRiver]

...If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve it, or feature requests let me know...

Thanks for such a great calculator, I use it all the time. I especially like that water volumes are given in depths that can be measured with a ruler. I'd like the option to have depths expressed in the practical fractions that appear on rulers (1/16, 1/8, etc.).

It's great to have access to all the numbers that are provided, but in reality most of the time I only use a few of them, just the ones that are needed to plan a brew day. It would be nice to have just those values visible, with an "expand" button to show all the "secondary" numbers.

Working on a complete rework that will have recipe formulation and fall under the "complete recipe builder" category but I'm still supporting my biab calc until I launch it!

Looking forward to it!