Mash Water Volume Help

[TheDPR]

I'm planning on brewing the Cottage House Saison located here:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f71/cottage-house-saison-254684

I should point out this will be my first BIAB attempt. I plan on increasing the grain bill to 12lbs total, so what should my mash volume be? I was thinking in the 8gal range, but was hoping for advice from those more experienced.

I don't know boil-off or anything like that yet, so obviously this would be a rough guide.

15gal kettle. Have a Wilser bag on the way.

Thanks in advance!

 

[haeffnkr]

Hi,
The recipe calls for 5.5 gallons with 75% efficiency, which are good starting numbers IMHO
Depending on how much you squeeze the bag, etc, you will lose around 7/8 - 1 gallon of water to the grain.

5.5 + 1 BIAB water + 1 ish for boil off = 7.5 gallons of water to start with.

thanks Kevin

 

[TopherM]

I lose about:

0.3 gallons of water to the grain (but this all depends on how good your personal bag squeezing procedure is)
+
1.2 gallons to boil off (directly dependent on the diameter of your pot and boil intensity)
+
0.75 gallons to trub
+
0.25 gallons to evaporation/contraction during cool down (yes, this is a real thing that most people overlook. Hot liquid both evaporates at a relatively high rate and contracts as it cools down)

So I personally lose about 2.5 gallons, and add that to my starting volume to calculate my full water volume (or at least BeerSmith does it for me!)

It is all very much dependent on your personal equipment and processes, though, so you really need to eventually measure these variables for yourself on a brewday!

Good luck!

 

[calvey]

I am a little late to the party, but I think I can offer some help. I'm just getting into BIAB and despite some nice tools out there for water I did not find one that did everything in the way I wanted, simply. So I have just launched BIABCalculator.com

As the posters said above, the real key to calculating the right amount of mash water is knowing some variables about your system. The biggies for me are the amount of Trub you leave behind, how much you boil off per hour, how much wort the grain retains (factoring in if you squeeze the bag or not is also important.) Also knowing these parameters you can know if you batch is going to overflow your kettle ahead of time - which is not a good thing obviously - but it sounds like you are good on a 15 gal kettle.

I am going to assume a whole bunch of things here - and you really should plug your real values into my calculator or another one - but I think you are looking at 7.75 gallons total mash water to make 5.25 gallons of beer if you boil for 60 minutes. If you leave a bunch of wort behind in your keg if you have drilled a drain tube or something like that you will need to adjust.

Best of Luck

 

[GREM]

Nice job on the calculator calvey . I went back thru my last 3 full volume BIAB brew notes & punched in my numbers just for comparison. I just bookmarked your calculator.

 

[newnick]

Calculator looks good. I use a couple of other ones that are comparably simple to use and work well also. Can never have enough resources.
Thanks for building it.