Advice on small batches

[AJ_Rowley]

Hey guys,

To those of you who do small batches (5l) I need a little bit of advice. While I'm building my big system which is a slow process at  the moment I was thinking of doing biab of small batches.

What size pot would be best for this. I was thinking 5l because I have seen the homebrew stores do 5l dj.

[Bubbles]

I've never done primary fermentation in a 5l demijohn but I'd imagine you're going to have to leave a little headspace in it, even if you plan on using a blowoff tube. That's 4 litres of beer in the demijohn. You'll probably lose another litre to trub after fermentation. You might also lose a small portion during transfer to bottle. I can't see you getting much more than 5 x 500ml bottles out of each batch. Ask yourself if it's worth all that effort.

In any case, if you want to ferment 5 litres of beer your pot will need to be much bigger in order to cope with boilovers. It will also need to hold your preboil volume (before evaporation).

To be honest, I'd think about scaling things up. Get a 20 litre stockpot and you can comfortably make 15 litre batches. More if you add a portion of malt extract near the end of the boil.

[irish_goat]

Use a 10l bucket and you'll have enough room for headspace.

http://www.thehomebrewcompany.ie/10-litre-fermentation-vessel-p-1055.html

[pob]

I've a 23l stockpot which I used for stovetop BIAB (actually maxiBIAB) before going to full vol BIAB in keggle.

You'll get approx 16l wort after boil & hops/break into FV, so could use a €6 20l Alpack bucket as a FV.

You're more than welcome to borrow it, to try a few batches until your system is up & running.

I'll even throw in the 'how to & what not to do' when using it, stop you making same mistakes I did when starting.

[TheSumOfAllBeers]

To those of you who do small batches (5l) I need a little bit of advice. While I'm building my big system which is a slow process at  the moment I was thinking of doing biab of small batches.

What size pot would be best for this. I was thinking 5l because I have seen the homebrew stores do 5l dj.

You will need about an 8-9L pot. You will need a lot of room for both the grain and lost water.

It is actually pretty hard to 'right size' small batches. You will lose a lot to trub in the DJ, and you can easily undershoot or overshoot your final volume.

It is actually a bit more practical to take the pot size up higher, to maybe 12 or 15L and brew beer into 2 DJs.

As always, go for taller, rather than wider pots, and add your hops with recoverable hop bags.

[Eoink]

For small biab batches - usually experimental beers (7 Litres)- I use a 10L stockpot but don't add the full volume of water for the 'mash'. After removing the grain bag I soak it in a bucket with final temperature water  and dunk it up and down a few times and use the resulting wort to make up the pre boil volumes.

There isn't a huge amount of headspace and  I have to watch it closely as it comes to the boil.
Having only 30% extra headspace on the final volume is probably a little bit tight. But by sparging and watching it closely as it comes to the boil it can be managed.


I use a 10L fermenter for these without any issues, 30% headspace seem to work fine.

[AJ_Rowley]

Thanks for all the advice guys as usual a great help.

[rAdve]

Hi, newbie small batch biab brewer here. I am looking for a new pot for my stove and I was wondering how big pot I can comfortably buy? I think my stove is 2 KW or something and it doesn't have these ceramic plates.

I saw 28cm/15L diameter pot and 30cm/19L pot on Moore street but dont know what kind of pot I should buy.  I have very limited space on my apartment.

Any suggestions?


Hannu

[John_C]

Your pot will need to fit into your oven for mashing and your sink for cooling. These set your max height and diameter. After that, get the biggest one that'll fit. 2kw will hold either at a boil and you can use a smaller pot on a second ring to speed up your heating times.

[rAdve]

Your pot will need to fit into your oven for mashing and your sink for cooling. These set your max height and diameter. After that, get the biggest one that'll fit. 2kw will hold either at a boil and you can use a smaller pot on a second ring to speed up your heating times.

Good point!

I think I already have maximum capacity pot for my oven. I think I can use sparge water so I can get bigger boil volume. I do have mash effiency problem though.

[John_C]

I used to get very low efficiency from by BIAB set up. I've read on the auzzie sites that they mill the grain very finely to account for the naturally low efficiency of the BIAB technique. I get my grain pre-crushed so I don't have that option. I was getting efficiencies of around 55% with the standard technique.

My new method is to pour the wort from my initial mash into a second pot and then do a sparge in my main pot. It's a bit messy since it involves lifting the grain bag with one hand while pouring the wort out of the pot with the other. You can then drop the grain bag back into the big pot and throw in a few kettles of sparge water at 80^oC.
I have a second pot which holds 7 liters so I can use that to start boiling my first runnings while the grains are sparging. If you don't have a second pot, you could use your fermenting vessel to hold the first runnings.

That bumped my efficiency up to around 70% and I'm reasonably happy with that. I don't have room for a mill so I reckon I'll be at this efficiency until I move somewhere bigger.

My other tip for small space brewing is to ferment your 12 liter batch in a corny keg. They're much tidier that the plastic buckets and they're entirely sealed so there's no danger of accidentally spilling some beer onto your carpet.

[RichC]

@JohnC, BIAB wasn't causing your efficiency issues. I used to have efficiency issues caused by my water. Once resolved, I've had efficiencies always in the 70s and 80s. I recently bought a grain mill, but it's set to default crush , not particularly fine. I previously bought premilled grain from several sources but efficiency was never an issue. I BIAB no sparge, just mashout and pull bag, always get good efficiency.

[John_C]

My efficiency jumped by 15% when i started sparging so it's hard to ignore that but I guess everyone's system is different. I might try a batch with my old technique some time to see if the problem comes back.

[rAdve]

How do you sparge?

I heated up a second pot with ~76C water and I changed my brew bag from mash pot to this sparge pot. Then I stir the grains a little bit inside the bag and I left the bag into the sparge pot for about 10 minutes.  After that I poured my first wort to this sparge pot and started boiling phase.

How do you measure how much water to use in mashing and how much in sparging? I made a 2 gallon batch with 2.3kg grains.

[mr hoppy]

I BIAB on a gas boiler so I can step mash and then transfer the goods to a picnic box where I sparge them leaving the first runnings behind in the boil pot / mash tun. Seems to be working pretty well so far.