using paint strainer

[Krispy Krouton]

Hi. First steps into using grains and I'm hoping to make an Exmoor gold clone. Lovely drink that is. After reading around a bit I've got some stuff on order and I'm looking forward to this. The recipe I'm following is for 23 litres but my brew pot is too small for a batch this size but hopefully an 18 litre pot will be big enough to make half this amount. Got a few questions I'm unsure of:

1. If I half the amounts on the recipe will it make the same beer but half the amount?

2. How much strike water is needed for 2.3kg of grain and how much should be used for sparging before the boil to make 11.5 litres of beer?

3. Because I'm using a bag in a pot I've read that the beer will be cloudy. It isn't that important to me to have clear beer if it tastes good but is this true?

Cheers.

Edit to add: 90 min mash, 90 min boil.

[byronb]

If you want to brew 23L you could try Maxi-BIAB. Take a look at viewtopic.php?f=35&t=67731 which links to another explanation on the brewuk forum, they use a spreadsheet that will calculate the amount of water you need.

You can half the weight of any malt and hops to half the recipe size, but leave the mash/boil times and hop addition times the same. Not sure if it's as simple as halving the water as that depends on things like the boil-off rate.

With BIAB the wort can be cloudy because it isn't filtered by the grain bed but at least for me that's never resulted in cloudy beer.

[Krispy Krouton]

Thanks for the reply. Just one more: I've gone and ordered the wrong size paint strainer. Instead of the 5 gallon size I've got 2 x 1 gallon bags on the way. Silly mistake. . Can I still use these though? Maybe fill them both and tie a knot in them? Just thinking it might be a bit tricky to get the dough balls out with these?

Cheers.

[mozza]

If you half the ingredients the final gravity will be much less due to a drop in efficiency. Factor that drop into your calculations

[Alan]

[quote="Krispy Krouton"]Thanks for the reply. Just one more: I've gone and ordered the wrong size paint strainer. Instead of the 5 gallon size I've got 2 x 1 gallon bags on the way. Silly mistake. . Can I still use these though? Maybe fill them both and tie a knot in them? Just thinking it might be a bit tricky to get the dough balls out with these?

Cheers.[/quote]

I find that a 5 gallon paint strainer is fairly stuffed with 5 kg of grain. Wouldn't want to put much more in there. So I guess you could use them for 2 x 1kg grain, but then it's going to be hard to stir unless you have the tops open, which will cause you problems. I think you'll struggle using 2 bags. But you can still use them for steeping specialty grains, etc. Or you could use them as hop bags.

[rpt]

I use the BIABacus from biabrewer.info. Great for scaling recipes and giving you all your volumes. BIAB doesn't make cloudy beer - there seems to be a lot of prejudice against it but it works a treat. I can't see any advantage in going 3V for average strength, standard brew lengths.