Is a flame regulator necessary?

[Canadian_Brewer]

I plan on doing my first BIAB. I do not have a propane/outdoor burner, but I have this faux fire place, and am thinking about building a stand around it. Question: Will it be okay if it does not have a flame adjustment valve? A lot of videos seem to use them, but could I not just add water in case it boils over?

Thank you!!

 

[pricelessbrewing]

As long as you can boil it you should be fine. The flame adjustment is probably just useful to keeping it from getting crazy vigorous boil.

FYI: Boil over tends to refer to liquids escaping over the top due to proteins, hops, or too vigorous a boil. I think you mean boiling too much, and comping up short on your volume. In which case I would do a wet run with water to determine roughly how much volume you boil over an hour.

Then get a metal ruler, and figure out using one of the many calculators (mine is located in my sig then click calculators at the top). The volume betwee pre boil and post boil will be linear as a fraction of hour. So 30 min into the boil you should be half way between pre boil and post boil. If your lower than that, add some boiled water from a pot/kettle to the brew kettle and you'll be fine. I prefer this method over adding after the boil is completed.

 

[SnakeRidge]

I would imagine that the faux fireplace produces pretty yellow/orange flames right? Not the blue flame you see on a propane stove? You might be able to achieve a boil, but your pot will get very sooty.

If you go that route, wipe the sides and underside of your dry pot with liquid dish soap. It will make cleanup a lot easier.

 

[Canadian_Brewer]

Thank you for the response it was helpful. I should have been more specific: I meant adding cold water when it boils over.

I may be wrong here, but in a number of videos, the process of BIAB involves having various water temperatures at different times. For example, having a boil at one point, then just simmering for a bit. Is that correct? In short, I thought that the temperature of your water was important to keep in check; with recipes calling for 160 F for an hour, say. It seems that to get to and maintain a given temperature might be hard with a faux fireplace. But with a good flame and a glass of cold water, it may be no problem - I just don't know because I have never tried before. Thoughts?

Thanks again for your help, I'll take as much as you can give me!

 

[pricelessbrewing]

Okay so that temp is called the mash temp, you heat to a temp some degrees above it then turn the heat source off or remove the pot from the heat source. Then you dough in.

Looks like you need to research a bit more, the key words revolving around this would be "dough in" "Strike temp" and "Mash temp". You shouldn't need to add any cold water.

 

[TexasWine]

I agree with priceless on doing some more research/reading. Have you read this thread yet?

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=233289

 

[Canadian_Brewer]

Thanks so much for the help and the clarification. The thread you posted was very helpful. Two questions came up for me though:


1) The immersion chillers; can bottles of frozen water suffice for a substitute?
2) The no sparge method; why, does it seem, you can get away without doing it? (like the guy in the thread you posted) It seems like a staple in many techniques, but in the thread you posted, it isn't used.

Thanks so much!

Reid

 

[pricelessbrewing]

Thanks so much for the help and the clarification. The thread you posted was very helpful. Two questions came up for me though:


1) The immersion chillers; can bottles of frozen water suffice for a substitute?
2) The no sparge method; why, does it seem, you can get away without doing it? (like the guy in the thread you posted) It seems like a staple in many techniques, but in the thread you posted, it isn't used.

Thanks so much!

Reid

1) Immersion chillers. If you can't cool quickly, I'd suggest looking into no chill instead. Just place your lid atop the kettle and let it cool over night. Exposing it to the air and having long cooling times can risk an infection as well as off flavors. Immersion chillers cost about 40~ bucks to diy one. Pretty simple, takes about 15-30 minutes depending on how design and how clean you want it to look.

2) No sparge works for biab mostly because you dont have to worry about stuck sparges.

 

[Canadian_Brewer]

Hmm makes sense. I'm still curious about the no sparge though. I can see why the bag would make it easy for no stuck sparges but I don't understand why that allows you to do away with sparging all together.

Thanks again

 

[doug293cz]

Hmm makes sense. I'm still curious about the no sparge though. I can see why the bag would make it easy for no stuck sparges but I don't understand why that allows you to do away with sparging all together.

Thanks again

The main purpose of sparging is to allow mashing with less than the full volume of brewing water, which allows mashing in a smaller vessel than if the full volume of water for the batch was used. This is particularly useful/necessary for commercial scale brewers. To do a full volume mash requires a mash tun with a volume approximately 2x larger than the final batch size.

A secondary benefit is improved efficiency in many cases. Although depending on the exact equipment configuration, a sparged mash may not yield improved efficiency over no sparge. For homebrew size batches, the efficiency difference may only be equivalent to a pound of grain in a 5 gal batch. Many brewers feel the reduced complexity is worth the trade off of slightly lower efficiency.

Brew on