Brewing tomorrow

[Rookie]

Five gallon batch at 1.050. I normally go by TINSETH.

[Rookie]

Bottled today.

[CJJ Berry]

Hi All
I could do with a bit of help, I brew very good extract beers, but I like to try BIAB , I have a 20L brewlution with a 2.0kW element, what is the biggest volume I can brew?

Cheers
Lying on the floor holding on!

[MashBag]

as much as fits in the bucket minus 3 or 4 inches?

Or have I missed your point?

[Cobnut]

The short answer is “probably about 16L”, but in truth it depends on a number of factors:

- how strong a beer you want to make
- how much “faff” you want

Let’s assume you want to make something like a 1.040 OG beer to give around 4.2% ABV, so options as I see are:

(Assuming your max volume for boil and mash is 20L. Also assume boil off rate of 3L per hour)

1) full volume BIAB (no sparge)

2.56kg pale malt and 18L mash water should give you a mash volume just under your 20L limit and around 1040 OG
This will give you a batch volume into the fermenter of a shade under 13L.
With fermenter losses at say 2L, you will get about 22 bottles from your brew day

2) BIAB with sparge

3.38kg pale malt & 9.2L mash water
Then you drop (or lower) the bag into a container of a further 12.6L water (can use cold, but same or slight.y higher temperature as the mash would be preferable) to batch sparge (I’d move the bag around to help rinse the grains) and leave for say 20 mins before draining thoroughly and then adding the resulting liquor to the boil. You should now have about 20L (your limit) which should get you about 17L post boil.

3) BIAB with sparge and liquoring back post boil

4.57kg pale malt, 12.34L mash water, 10.29L sparge water and a further 6L water added to the fermenter to get you to 23L at 1.040

In all the above cases, ALL your water should be treated - in my case this means with CRS/AMS to reduce alkalinity (a whole discussion in its’ own right - plenty of material here on JBK to help you too).

And hop quantities to be adjusted to achieve the required bitterness and aroma/flavour profile.

Similarly, the yeast quantity for the batch size.

I use Brewfather (other software available) which can be used to do these calculations. It will also guide you through building your equipment profile for which you need some of the assumptions above plus a few others.

Good luck.