What is my boil size for this partial mash recipe?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Madmartigan

Member
Joined
May 10, 2011
Messages
10
Reaction score
0
Location
cincinnati
Hi!

I'm going to be starting my second partial mash soon, and the recipe I found was a bit vague on what the boil size should be, or even the amounts of water used for sparging. Can someone help me determine these things? This is for a 5.25 gallon batch:
__________________________
Partial mash:
1 lb biscuit malt
1 lb chocolate malt
12 oz flaked oats
8 oz crystal 80
8 oz pale 2 row malt
8 oz special roast
4 oz smoked malt
(looking back, I should have used more pale 2 row)

Then add:
3 lbs 2.5 oz Dark LME (boil 60 mins)
1 lb milk sugar/lactose (boil 60 mins)
5.5 oz Dark Brown Sugar (boil 60 mins)
10 oz Molasses (boil 60 mins)
1 oz williamette hops (boil 15 mins)
1 Whirlfloc tablet (boil 15 mins)
12 oz cocoa powder (boil 15 mins)
1 lb honey (boil 5 mins)
.2 oz cinnamon sticks (2 sticks) – (boil 5 mins)

Cool, then pitch:
1 package dry Safeale US-05

21 day primary @ 68 degrees

Add 2.5 tsp vanilla extract to empty secondary container and siphon beer on top
Secondary for 1 week

Bottle using ~4 oz of corn sugar
_______________________________

Thank you in advance

-Madmartigan
 
I know this is from that s'more beer thread and is intended to be an off the wall beer so I will refrain from commenting on the recipe except to say that I'm getting nauseated just reading it.

To your questions, for the partial mash in general you want more base malt - something like 50/50 base to specialty malts that need conversion. You can mash in 1.25-1.5 qt per lb and sparge with about a similar amount. As far as your boil volume, how big is your kettle and how do you chill? If you've got the equipment go ahead with a full boil. Or you could do a partial boil with just the wort from your mash and sparge then add any extract/sugars late and top off in the fermenter.

Good luck. Glad you're going to be drinking it and not me.
:mug:
 
Looks like a standard partial mash recipe. For your mash, you have 4.5 lb of malt and in general you want 1.25-2 qts of water per lb of grain. So by those calculations, you'll use 5.6-9 quarts of water for the mash-in. For sparge water, it will depend on the amount of wort you've already collected assuming you're doing a batch sparge. I would probably sparge with about 1.5-2 gallons of water as a really rough estimate. Depending on your setup, you'll end up with 2-3 gallons of wort for the boil.

Just follow the boil directions there, they look good.
You'll likely want to top-off your fermenter with water to get it to about 5.25 gallons.
And like you mentioned, it wouldn't hurt to up the pale 2 row malt to 1 lb in the mash to give it a bit more diastatic power.

Remember these are all rough numbers, but they should work well enough.
 
I know this is from that s'more beer thread and is intended to be an off the wall beer so I will refrain from commenting on the recipe except to say that I'm getting nauseated just reading it.

To your questions, for the partial mash in general you want more base malt - something like 50/50 base to specialty malts that need conversion. You can mash in 1.25-1.5 qt per lb and sparge with about a similar amount. As far as your boil volume, how big is your kettle and how do you chill? If you've got the equipment go ahead with a full boil. Or you could do a partial boil with just the wort from your mash and sparge then add any extract/sugars late and top off in the fermenter.

Good luck. Glad you're going to be drinking it and not me.
:mug:

Thank you VERY much for your reply. I have a 7 gallon turkey fryer kettle, and will be using a stationary tub filled with chilled water + ice once it cools a little first. Since I don't have an immersion chiller, I think it to be best to boil the wort + the sparge and top off to 5.25 in the fermenter like you said. I just didn't know if I was "allowed" to do that with this recipe.

Haha. What about it would you change to make it drinkable for YOU? I'm interested in your opinion :D Or are you just not a sweet beer person at all?
 
Looks like a standard partial mash recipe. For your mash, you have 4.5 lb of malt and in general you want 1.25-2 qts of water per lb of grain. So by those calculations, you'll use 5.6-9 quarts of water for the mash-in. For sparge water, it will depend on the amount of wort you've already collected assuming you're doing a batch sparge. I would probably sparge with about 1.5-2 gallons of water as a really rough estimate. Depending on your setup, you'll end up with 2-3 gallons of wort for the boil.

Just follow the boil directions there, they look good.
You'll likely want to top-off your fermenter with water to get it to about 5.25 gallons.
And like you mentioned, it wouldn't hurt to up the pale 2 row malt to 1 lb in the mash to give it a bit more diastatic power.

Remember these are all rough numbers, but they should work well enough.

THANK YOU so very much for your reply. I'm just never sure when I'm allowed to do a partial boil versus a full boil based on recipes given like this. I want to get to that point where I read a recipe, no matter how descriptive, and be like "ok, so I do this, this, this, and this, and BOOM...done."
 
Haha. What about it would you change to make it drinkable for YOU? I'm interested in your opinion :D Or are you just not a sweet beer person at all?

I admit I'm not a huge sweet beer fan so that's part of it, although I do enjoy a good sweet stout now and then. This recipe with a lb of lactose and only a single 15 min hop addition sounds sickeningly sweet though (have you run the specs on this by the way? I'm guessing it's like 8 IBU's). On top of that I count 5 specialty malts plus the smoked malt, dark extract which has more specialty malts, 3 different flavored sugars, and finally let's throw in some cocoa, cinnamon, and vanilla. Sounds like an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, muddled mess of flavors to me. Like I said, better you than me! :D

You can pretty much do any extract or partial mash recipe as a partial boil, but the one thing you may want to pay attention to is the IBU calcuation. If the recipe is figured for one or the other that may skew things a bit. It's probably a bigger issue with very bitter beers where you're close to maxing out on IBU's in the boil then diluting them at top off. You can always plug the recipes into software or a decent online calculator where you can enter your variables like boil volume just to double check that the specs aren't way off from what the recipe intended.
 
Back
Top