Picobrew (not the automatic machine)

[Boothy]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has tried the method used on www.picobrew.co.uk using a thermal cooker Any comments on it ?

It appeals as I don't want to end up with 30-0 pints of a particular style, plus I plan (at least in part) to use my own hops, so the recipes might need a bit of experimentation so smaller quantities are helpful if I get it wrong

Would work well , as he suggests , with mini kegs.

Hopefully I put this in the correct forum .

Cheers,
Boothy.

[aamcle]

If I understood the page linked to correctly it's about £100, that's insane.

If you want to do 5 - 10 litres a 15 litre stock pot on the stove will do the job for under £20.

Search for BIAB on the forum.


good luck. Aamcl

[Boothy]

Cheers mate, will take a look. I have a decent sized pot already, might be able to use that.

[BrannigansLove]

When I started all-grain brewing I did full volume 10L batches in a 20L stockpot from ebay. (wrapped in an old sleeping bag during the mash) Having previously made extract brews, it wasn't a much longer process than that.

[Boothy]

Cheers, looks like I can give it a go with the kit I have and see how I get on. I've got a 10l one already, so could easily do enough to fill a mini keg. I'll have a good read through the forums.

[basswulf]

My stock pot is 13l. I find that I get about 6-7l beer in the bottle if I start out by scaling a recipe to start with 10l water. I use a bag for the grains. Rather than sparging, I let it drain back into the wort and then sit the bag on a colander over a bowl, tipping further liquid into the boil until I reach the point where I'm only getting a tiny amount out. That's the first water loss - what can't easily be squeezed out of the mashed grain.

The stock pot now has less than 10l in - enough headroom for a rolling boil although I don't turn my back on it while it is getting going and still keep quite a close eye on things through out the proceedings. I use hop pellets so no liquid loss there but the boil will take the water volume down further. After the boil - and adding some irish moss near the end - I transfer to a sanitised plastic jerry can to cool overnight. A few dregs get lost here and when transferring back to the same stock pot for fermenting the next day but my experiments suggest you don't hurt the beer by only fermenting with clear wort so there isn't a lot of loss here.

Once fermentation is done (in the stock pot with the lid on and a plastic bag over the top as a primitive airlock) I siphon back into the jerry can which is marked so I can get an approximate measure. This is the biggest post-boil loss as I want to minimise the trub transfer. I clean the stock pot, add my priming sugar dissolved in a little water and siphon back the beer to mix it with the sugar before bottling. The end result will be about 12-13 500ml bottles.

You could follow a very similar procedure for a 10l stock pot, except you'd need to scale down further to give you headroom for the boil, so you might end up with 7-8 bottles and very small additions for some of the grains and hops.

The main disadvantage of this small scale brewing is that you still have to spend the same amount of time on measuring and cooking and not far off on sanitising bottles. You also need to pay a bit more attention to maintaining the mash temperature compared to either a better insulated pot or a larger volume of water, although you could go a long way towards fixing that for a lot less than a thermal pot.

Wulf