Well, I'll be kicking off my first BIAB on Saturday. I've done extract brews before.
Any pro tips?
I'll be grinding the malt myself. Does anyone have a reference picture for correct coarseness?
Lastly, roughly how much extra grain versus a recipe would you add for BIAB to achieve the same OG as a full mash / sparge cycle?
Interested in following this post, as I'll be doing my first BIAB later on this year as well, once I drink down the stock levels a bit.
Right now I have an Amber Ale, Russian Imperial Stout, Spiced Ale and a belgian Triple to drink through, so it may take a while... :)
Quote from: molc on July 31, 2014, 02:32:32 PM
Interested in following this post
I'll try and document it a bit, so. :) I'm just going to be doing small batches (probably 12-15 litres). Initially probably sticking to single hops so that I get a flavour for the various ones. Hoping to do a brew a week to get expertise levels up quickly. I just about have enough small FV's to achieve a rolling brew a week with brews that size.
Yeah I think in future I'm going to start doing 10 litre brews, as I'm going through the beers very slowly. Which means less brewing. Even a 5 litre brew could be a great way of testing ideas, but I think the kettle is too big to do that and cover the element sufficiently.
I've read online you should be able to pass a bank card through your rollers. I've been using crushed grain so don't have any real experience.
I have been using AG recipes directly for BIAB and have been hitting the numbers spot on.
I use a corona mill and just make sure it is not coming out too floury.
My efficiency for BIAB is about 70% - lowest 65% highest 75% it depends on the o.g. of the beer.
coarser grain gives you better effeciency but causes a bit of a mess, i use regular milled grain from The homebrew company and get 70% effeciency atleast, if you want best effeciency do full volume mash, mash for 90 minutes, stirring every now and again and squeeze the hell out of the bag, maybe even hold back a litre or two in your water volume and throw it over the grain, i done this last time and got a lot more sugar out of the grains. good luck anyway BIAB is great and produces great beer
Quote from: Khannie on July 31, 2014, 02:25:05 PM
Well, I'll be kicking off my first BIAB on Saturday. I've done extract brews before.
Any pro tips?
I'll be grinding the malt myself. Does anyone have a reference picture for correct coarseness?
Lastly, roughly how much extra grain versus a recipe would you add for BIAB to achieve the same OG as a full mash / sparge cycle?
1. No extra grain required. If your water is OK you should get efficiency at least as good as 3V brewing.
2. DONT sparge, its not true BIAB(but some seem to do it) and its not neccesary. Full volume at beginning.
3. I dont dump the grain bag into the hot water as I think some do. I line the pot with the bag, and pour in grain while stirring. No doughballs.
4. W.r.t. coarsness of crush I just use my Crankandstein at the standard width setting so not sure what that is.
5. Drink slowly or start drinking late on brew day. brewing spannered just adds to screwups(for me).
6. I do a 90min mash and 90min boil usually as recommended on BIABrewer.info
enjoy!
Thanks for the replies everyone. Some great tips in there.
Quote from: RichC on August 01, 2014, 09:15:53 AM
5. Drink slowly or start drinking late on brew day. brewing spannered just adds to screwups(for me).
Had a good laugh at this one. :D
I find batch sparge best for my biab set up
Quote from: RichC on August 01, 2014, 09:15:53 AM
1. No extra grain required. If your water is OK you should get efficiency at least as good as 3V brewing.
2. DONT sparge, its not true BIAB(but some seem to do it) and its not neccesary. Full volume at beginning.
3. I dont dump the grain bag into the hot water as I think some do. I line the pot with the bag, and pour in grain while stirring. No doughballs.
4. W.r.t. coarsness of crush I just use my Crankandstein at the standard width setting so not sure what that is.
5. Drink slowly or start drinking late on brew day. brewing spannered just adds to screwups(for me).
6. I do a 90min mash and 90min boil usually as recommended on BIABrewer.info
Agree with most points. I find for high gravity beers some kind of sparge is useful. Dunk sparge being the best.
However fine crush, then crush again, squeezing the hell out of the bag, gets you really good "default" efficiency. Only sparge after you have done all that.
90 min mash with stirs every 30 mins or so. Agree with point 3 above, no dough balls
Well....it was a learning experience. :D
I reckoned beforehand I could get to pitching within 3.5 hours and it took 5. Not sure if that was because of my lack of experience or that it just takes that long. My OG ended up lower than expected but that's my own fault (I was eyeballing the wort amount and added in some that I shouldn't have at the end).
I also ground a bit too fine so there was a good bit of fine grain left behind (grist?). I passed the wort through a sanitised gold filter on its way into the fermenting bucket and that got rid of most of it.
Still it should make a very tasty IPA that rolls in at the 5.5% mark which I think is about spot on for an IPA.
It's fermenting away there. The recipe calls for 14 days dry hopping. Think I'll be going with 7.
Welcome to the AG, its never easy always a day of drama
Khannie were u based. Brewday dis saturday at best brewer 2014's base wher u can significantly improve ur brewing
Quote from: Covey on August 06, 2014, 12:42:15 PM
Welcome to the AG, its never easy always a day of drama
That was the other thing I learned. :D
Quote from: brenmurph on August 06, 2014, 01:15:51 PM
Khannie were u based. Brewday dis saturday at best brewer 2014's base wher u can significantly improve ur brewing
I'm in North County Dublin. Where is this on?
Kildare
Quote from: Khannie on August 06, 2014, 01:24:42 PM
I'm in North County Dublin. Where is this on?
Khannie, if you're from the North feel free to join North Country Brewers on our monthly
meetup in Old Boro Swords next Tuesday for a pint or two and a chat :D
if kildare is a bit of a strech we are also doing a brewday in the city center saturday, not quite on par with the kildare center of excellence master class but close :P, kicking off around 10:30
http://www.tog.ie/location/ (http://www.tog.ie/location/) <- location
http://www.nationalhomebrewclub.com/forum/index.php/topic,7345.0.html (http://www.nationalhomebrewclub.com/forum/index.php/topic,7345.0.html) <- thread
Hehe, let the recruiting commence :)
I keep trying to make the tog day and something always gets in the way. By hell or high water, I'm going to the September one!
Yes folks get to ur local meets or one further away. We are a national club and everyone is welcome at each others events and brewdays. I was thinking that if we had a theme to our brew days it may help keep people focused and learning specific topics so this week on our catch up brew Saturday (following the dunking of nearly 500 pints at our wedding party im flat out recovering. So we are starting to think lagers wit view to helping members get head around this topic. We hav already brewed 2 this week for a certain comp on the way.
Would absolutely love to head along to either of those brew days, but I have a bejaysus hayp of kids, so giving up an entire Saturday afternoon is currently out. :(
Welcome Khannie. Also if you're North County Dublin, come along to one of the NCB meets in Swords. You'll see details in the brewing community area of the forum.
Anyway I thought I'd post a message here as a BIAB brewer with my method and ideas about sparging...
I understand that real BIAB is doing your mash with full volume. The reason I sparge is that my brew kettle will not be large enough for me to do a full size brew if I was to mash with full volume and still come out with a decent amount of wort.
- So I start with around 17L or so of water in the pot.
- Depending on the recipe, the volume of the 30L pot could go right up to max with the grain and water.
- After the mash I take out the bag of malt.
- Drop this into a fermenter with around 13L-15L or so of water at Sparge temp as a batch sparge.
- At the end I can have around 28L of wort in the pot pre boil and I end up with a decent amount of beer at the end.
If I didn't do the batch sparge I'd probably only end up with 12L or 13L of beer.
In terms of equipment, I obviously need a spare bucket to do the sparge as well as a smaller pot or HLT to get the 13L of sparge water up to temp. I had these already, but if I needed to go out and buy it would be a good lot cheaper than going looking for a 50L pot to do full volume mashing to get the same amount of beer.
Colm
Hi ,
I do something like this with a 27 liter electric pot.
I mash in my boiler filled to the brim using the thermostat set to 67C.
I put a stainless steel vegetable steamer in the bottom to keep the bag from scorching and give it a stir every so ofter to distribute the heat.
Towards the end of the mash I just boil the kettle a few times and put about 10 liters (I use the BIAB spreadsheet for volumes) of water in a fermenting bucket. By the time it all boiled the bucket should be cooled to less than 80C.
I then batch sparge and top up the boiler up to about 24 liters and kick off the boil.
Depending on evaporation I'd end up with 16-18 liters of wort but I either top up the boil pot with 15 minutes left with sparged water do a post boil bottled water dilution. I haven't decided which is better yet.
I usually aim for 19-21 liters of finished beer using two vessels.
Of course the bigger the boiler the better.