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Upgrading to 10 Gallons

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10 gal. My efficiency is 60-65%. I have pretty much given up on trying to get a better efficiency. I can't afford to buy my own grain mill, and my stupid LHBS's cannot get thin enough .

Check out the Corona mill. Regardless of what you think about it plenty of us using one (for years I might add) and you will be able to fine tune your grind to your system.

Keep your eyes out for one and you can make a bucket in bucket grain mill for less than 30.

check out all the threads.
 
I have a 15 gallon kettle based setup and usually do ten gallon brews.

One thing I've noticed recently, is that in order to get the full bitterness potential from your hops, you need enough power to boil to the point of flirting with and even experiencing small boilovers when brewing 10 gallons in a 15 gallon kettle. And yes, even with fermcap. How do I know this? Well, I have the ability to increase or decrease the propane pressure on my burners. I recently brewed three DIPA beers all bittered with hop extract and all the same amount. One beer was significantly more bitter and better tasting bitterness. This one I had some tiny intermittent boilovers with. If you can swing it, try to get a 20 gallon boil kettle.

One other thing about ten gallons. Be prepared with what to do with the spent grain. It will be a significant increase.

One other thing. If using immersion chiller, adding a recirculation setup to the hot wort help tremendously. A larger and longer coil also helps.

One other thing. If brewing Pilsner or other beers with a significant percentage Pils malt, you might have a hard time trying to boil for 90 minutes at an appropriate intensity without having boilovers due to the larger starting volume. May need to tinker with recipe a bit, or consider adding top off water after 30 minutes rather than begin with full wort volume. Also, you will need to ensure your burner can boil at an appropriate intensity to drive off the DMS, unless you like drinking creamed corn. Again, ask me how I know.

Evenly splitting the post-boil wort into two fermenters isn't easy.

One other thing. Consider brewing a smaller volume of higher gravity wort and then diluting in the fermenter to desired volume. This can help to improve boil efficiency without need to buy bigger burner or larger pot.

Also consider, if you have the means, to split wort into two boil kettles and conduct simultaneous boils, or offset by fifteen minutes (or however long it takes to cool half the boiled wort so that you can immediately cool the second kettle if you only have one chiller), and brew two different beers from the same wort (adding steeping grains or wort from a second mini-mash or additional sugars etc if desired.). This is something that is fun and you can experiment with different hop schedules and techniques and varieties. If the gravity is reasonable (say 1.050), you might be able to brew 20 gallons if you begin with high gravity wort from a maxed out mash tun, split into two boil kettles, and then diluted to appropriate volume.

Have fun.


Sent from my iPad using Home Brew
 
^ What he said.

I cool my wort and siphon it out now, running it through a sanitized mesh bag to filter out debris and aerate my wort.
 
Hmm, interesting. So far in my 3 ten gallon batches I have gotten better than anticipated bittering compared with my 5 gallon batches - I'm thinking the increase in chill time may make my late hops more bitter.

One thing you might do with Pils based beers is a single decoction of liquid only. I find if I mash at 148 1.25qts/lb that running out the entire tun, boiling for 15 minutes, then adding back will bring me to perfect mash out temps and let me get away with only 75 minute boil. The first runnings have the bulk of the DMS after all.
 
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