Minimum amount of water for BIAB?

[SlackingAtWork]

Hi all. Novice here. So I've only ever brewed with extract. Now I need to add some sweetness to my spruce beer to balance out its acerbic bitterness. I've used at least six pounds of Briess Pilsen DME and/or Golden Light for each five gallon batch so far. Was thinking that I'd try going with five lbs DME and do a partial mash with crystal malt. The crystal malt would have to be equivalent to one pound of DME. My understanding is that they don't make crystal malt extract, therefore I would need to do partial mash.

My issue is this: I don't do five gallon boils because I don't have the equipment for it. Takes all day on my stove to boil five gallons of water and my kettle isn't big enough anyway, so I put three gallons of water in the carboy and do my boil with a little over 2 gallons for an hour. I don't even have a wort chiller because of my non-standard faucet, so I have to put my kettle in the sink with ice and cold water around it to cool it down.

Was thinking I could do the crystal malt portion with BIAB and then add the five pounds of DME to the wort I made, then proceed to do my usual recipe with a one hour boil. The crystal malt wort I do would have to be the equivalent of one pound of the DME.

My question is: If I were to do that, how much water would I end up with in the kettle after all the sparging, etc? Are we talking 2-3 gallons? Again, I'm trying to do the equivalent of 1 lb of DME, then add five pounds of DME to that, and it would be ideal to keep it to around the same amount of water needed to do my concentrated boil.

 

[IslandLizard]

Welcome to our homebrew forums!

Crystal malts (and all dark malts) can be simply steeped in the kettle with hot water on the stove, before adding your DME. No mashing needed!
For that, make sure your crystal malt is well-crushed/milled. There should be no whole kernels left, and although it can be milled quite finely for rapid extraction, it should also not be all very fine powder. Put that milled malt inside a mesh (steeping) bag together with any other (milled) malts you want to steep, and steep at 150-170°F for 30 minutes. Do not boil that bag with (steeping) malts!
https://www.brewingwithbriess.com/homebrewing/steeping-specialty-malts/

For your own reference, look up the difference between mashing and steeping. Diastatic malts need to be mashed (not steeped) to convert starches to sugars. Most Specialty malts also benefit from being mashed.

Although steeping and mashing are similar processes there are noted differences, e.g., mashing requires a narrow temperature range and pH.

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

On brewing 5 gal DME batches using a weak heat source (e.g. stove top)

• How to Brew (4th edition, 2017) section 1 describes a process to brew 5 batches using DME on a stove top. The first chapter walks threw a brew day, the remaining chapters in the section provide additional details on ingredients and process.
• Chapters 8 and 13 in How to Brew (3rd edition, 2005) contain similar information. A free copy of the 3rd edition is available at howtobrew.com.
• There are a number of good refinements to this process. For example, this topic (link) is one example that uses some of the water to dissolve the DME (without clumping). Other brewers will set aside chilled

 

[ncbrewer]

Good comments above. I'll add that you couldn't mash crystal malt by itself anyway - it has no diastatic power.

 

[ncbrewer]

BTW - as a shortcut, you could use amber DME instead of adding crystal malt. From what I've seen, amber malt extract is typically 10% caramel 60 and 5% Munich.

 

[Bobby_M]

Yup, as others said, you're way overthinking it. There are a handful of grain types that can be steeped in warm water for 10-15 minutes to get the flavor and color out. That's all the caramel/crystal malts, dark roasted stuff, and some biscuit malts like Victory.

You can also do concentrated boils and just top up the rest with pure water in the fermenter. I'd say boiling at least 3 gallons is best practice.