How to brew with a small pot (8.5 liter (2.25 gal))

[Oslobrew]

I have brewed a couple brew kits and would now like to try something other than a kit. The way I understand it is there are three options to move forward: 1)all grain, 2) partial mash, 3) extract recipes that don’t use a kit. I would like eventually try all three methods. My limitation is that the apartment I live in has a strange induction stove with a really low hood. So I can’t fit large pots under the hood and the induction stove limits what pots I can use. So I can either start small as the largest pot I can buy that works/fits is 8.5 liter (2.25 gal) or buy an external electric pot that is $500. I’m thinking I should try some small batches.

So my question is does anyone have rules of thumb for how much water I need to heat for standard recipes. What I’m thinking is how much water I need to heat per lb of grain in all grain and partial mash or how much water versus pound of dry extract? If I had a understanding of this I could go to the recipe forum and scale down a recipe for my pot size. I’m thinking with this size pot I would be limited to a volume of heated water around 1.5 gal or 1.75 gal.

Also any small batch recipes would be much appreciated. I’m pretty open to trying most beer types as long as I can ferment them at 68F.

Thanks in advance for any replies

 

[prpromin]

You can take just about any recipe and reduce it for your size. Brewing full 5 gallon batches might be tough with your set-up. You could probably do 1 or 2 gallon batches easily - there's a thread on that around here someplace. If you are not comfortable reducing the recipes yourself, take the original to your lhbs and tell them what you want to do. If it is anything like mine, they can use beersmith to do the work and print you out a recipe to follow.

Good luck!

 

[Oslobrew]

So for example there is a recipe called 15min cascade ale in the recipes forum. it calls for:

6lb dry LME
1 lb crystal
cascade hops

So i would have to assume 5 gal full boil since this info isnt given. Since I would do about 2 gal I would just scale down quantities by 2/5. Sound correct?

Also I thought of another question. Do I need to buy a smaller fermenter? Any problem doing a 2 gal batch in a 8 gal fermenter?

 

[prpromin]

That reduction is the general idea. Plug it into something like this hopville's Beer Calculus (free online) in both the original and reduced recipe to make sure everything looks good. You may need to adjust hop additions to keep it similar to the original.

I would get a smaller fermenter - a 3 gal Better Bottle would work great. All that extra space is undesirable.