partial mash....

[bwookie]

Im trying to figure this out, im making the jump to full boil all grain, but its a slow process getting the equipment.... And i dont want to stop brewing in the mean time!

I am curious on what exactly partial mash i could do.... I di have a 10gallon cooler converted mashtun, and a keg to become a keggle soon... But for now i have a 22qt pot, im scared to fill that thing to the brim.... Can i do a normal mash, with less sparge water to do say a 4 gallon boil, then add in 1 or 2 gallons of just water to the fermentor? Or because im not running enough sparge through will i lose alot of good sugars?

 

[nukebrewer]

With a typical grain bill, I get somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 gallons for a pre-sparge volume, sometimes a little more. For you this would mean only having 1 gallon with which to sparge.

This isn't a huge deal for fly sparging, since the grain bed will be full of wort until you run out of sparge water, though you are correct that you'll get less sugar than if you could sparge more. For batch sparging it becomes a problem since 1 gallon won't be enough to rinse the grain bed adequately by itself.

Another other option is no sparge, where you could use the extra gallon to mash out and then drain without sparging. I've heard of many people having success with this method, though I've never tried it myself.

A couple other options I can think of are splitting the boil between two pots so you can do a full boil and doing smaller batches.

Hope that helped some. Cheers!

 

[Pie_Man]

You can always do a smaller batch, like 3-4 gallons. That's what I did when I was transitioning to all-grain with full boils.

Personally, I'd recommend the use of brewing software like beersmith. You can download a 30 day trial version. Once you setup your equipment profile, you'll be able to easily calculate what recipe, sparge volumes, etc. will fit your equipment.

 

[bobbrews]

Years ago, I started brewing full volume/partial mash IPAs indoors in a 17.7 quart kettle, which is roughly 4.3 to 4.4 gallons to the brim. I never had a boilover despite filling the kettle to 4.2 gallons everytime. If you know how to avoid boilovers and what causes them, then you will never see one. I usually shot for 1.065-1.075 OG. 3 lbs. of grain used, and the rest was DME or sugar (some of which was added later in the boil to allow for less displacement of water at the boil start). I mashed the grain in a seperate, smaller pot via a fine mesh bag to hold the grain (BIAB). Then I dipped that several times in my main kettle with 170-ish water to rinse the grain. After the grain was discarded and the wort was collected, I used that mesh bag for my pellet hop additions. Simply wrap the bag around the kettle handle away from the flame. After the boil's end, I would have 3 to 3.2 gallons for fermentation...very little trub. Shoot me a message if you want to learn more about creating quality partial mash beers with limited means. Where there's a will there's a way. Presently, I brew outdoors. But on occassion, I will brew indoors... with easier means. I bought another equal sized kettle so I can do dual boils, splitting the recipe in half and straddling two burners with each kettle.

 

[billl]

The typical partial-mash is "mostly extract with a little mash". There is no rule against flipping that though. You could certainly do as big as mash as you can boil and then just use a late addition of DME and dilute with water in the fermenter. That is going to require a fair amount of on-the-fly conversions and adjustments.

The obvious alternative is to just do a smaller batch or 2 until you get the keg converted. There is something to be said for having only 2 gallons of "learning process" vs 5 gallons.

 

[bwookie]

True to all of that! Thanks for the tips... I just built my keggle, worked great, so im thinking i might be done with my equipment soon enough to just do full batches... But if not i will definitely get a smaller batch going to keep my brewing alive!

Thanks again!

 

[amandabab]

The typical partial-mash is "mostly extract with a little mash". There is no rule against flipping that though. You could certainly do as big as mash as you can boil and then just use a late addition of DME and dilute with water in the fermenter. That is going to require a fair amount of on-the-fly conversions and adjustments.

I do a lot of big partial mashes.
A strip 3lbs of DME out of the extract recipe and sub 5 lbs grain (to save money).
mash the grain and any specialty grains and get about 4.5 gallons of wort. just a little to much for a kitchen stockpot that my stove will boil so I split it. boil both, hop the big pot, add the little pot after some boil-off, it was boiling so no temp loss and top off to 5 gallons in the fermentor. easy kitchen brewing.