Looking for some advice on increasing batch size to 10 gallons

[SirStraub]

Two of my friends and I have recently started all grain brewing. We started at 5 gallons. We've bottled a few batches but been disappointed by the yield of splitting it three ways. I've read here that increasing to six gallons when you're ready to mash your grain will increase your yield closer to 5 gallons, which would put us just under 20 beers per person instead of the 13 we're getting now.

Still, that doesn't seem quite worth the time and effort. So we've decided to move to ten gallon batches. However, we've been talking some things over and had some questions about the move up:

What do you use to ferment ten gallons of wort? I've never seen a ten gallon bucket (although the brew shop may be able to order something of that sort). Or should we switch to two 10g carboys for primary and secondary? My thought was maybe a 12g water cooler. Drilling a hole in the top with a gasket to house an airlock.

Would a second water cooler work as a secondary fermenter, or should we try and split it into two 5g carboys?

And I think the last thing was about boiling wort. I think for consistency purposes it's best to buy a hollowed out keg to boil in, just to keep everything in one place. But, since we already have a 5g boiling pot, it would be cheaper to buy another 5g pot. The issue I have with this is getting exactly 1/2 of your wort into each pot to boil, and splitting your hops exactly in half. Maybe I'm being overzealous and it wouldn't matter that much, though.

We've been ice bathing our 5g batches, which has worked pretty well, but I think for 10g we'll need a wort chiller (or two if we go with the two 5g boil pots)

Anyway, I was just looking for a few tips on moving up in the world of brewing. If you have any other advice I'd be glad to hear it.

 

[autobaun70]

My method (up until recently) has been as follows. I recently added an additional burner and an additional keggle, but you can easily get by with one keggle, one burner, a cooler mash tun, and a couple of 5 gal buckets.

I share the same keggle with valve for both my HLT and my boil kettle. For a mash tun I use a 70 qt cooler (60 qt will work in most cases, I happened to have a 70) with a stainless braid.

Step 1: I heat the mash water in the kettle, then drain into the mash tun. Mash for desired time.

Step 2. Add sparge water to kettle. With about 30 minutes to go in the mash start heating it up, I typically heat to 185 for most of the beers that I brew.

Step 3. Drain mash tun into the buckets (hint, using buckets with graduation markers on them makes getting your sparge water quantity easy). You will have around 6.5-7.0 gal of wort, so splitting into two buckets makes pouring into the kettle later on very easy.

Step 4. Drain sparge water from keggle into mash tun.

Step 5. Dump buckets of wort from first runnings into the keggle.

Step 6. Drain sparge water form mash tun to either the kettle, or the buckets, doesn't really matter. If you don't have a site glass or measuring stick I like going into the buckets to make measuring your preboil easier.

Step 7. Boil as usual.

Step 8. Cool batch, and split equally between two bucket fermenters.

I'm sure you know the rest.

 

[Bezel]

Check with your local hime brew shop, liquid extract containers are 15 gallons and perfect for 10 gal batches

 

[OneHoppyGuy]

Least expensive way is to make/buy a keggle for boiling. I like the idea of buckets, It allows you to try different dry hopping methods etc.

 

[dfess1]

I brew 10 gal and split between two 6.5 gal carboy's for primaries. I don't have room for another fridge that would house a conical. This works for me. Plus, you can experiment between the wort with different dry hopping/yeast.