First BIAB

[brenmurph]

Kildare

[Jacob]

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

[beerfly]

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  , kicking off around 10:30

http://www.tog.ie/location/ <- location
http://www.nationalhomebrewclub.com/forum/index.php/topic,7345.0.html <- thread

[molc]

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!

[brenmurph]

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.

[Khannie]

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.

[ColmR]

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.

• Add the grain,

• 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

[mcooney]

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.