10 gallon yield from a 10 gallon pot

jmarc22

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So here it goes,
Is it possible to all grain brew with a 10 gallon kettle and end with 10 gallons of wort in the fermentor? Or do you need to make exactly the amount of wort in the kettle? Or can you fill with water to attain 10 Gallons in the fermentor? I apologize for the question if it's ridiculous as I am a novice brewer and I have never all grain brewed. I want to start doing all grain as well as larger batches, but I only have a 10 gallon kettle.
- Thanks
 
I will try to answer this for you, the short answer is no to get 10 gallons of wort after a 60 minute boil you need to start with around 11.5 gallons

so your going to want a pot bigger then 11.5 gallons to boil in, how big that is somewhat up to you

I boil 13 gallons of wort in a 16 gallon pot, if you are looking to get 10 gallons of beer out of your fermenter you are going to need to put more then 10 gallons in it

to get two full kegs I put around 11.5 gallons in my fermenter

to do 10 gallons of finished beer out of a 10 gallon pot you need to do a partial mash and top up

hope that helps

S_M
 
for "best results" doing all grain; you need twice the size of pot for your batch of beer being made. a 10 gallon batch will need a 20 gallon pot. Ive made 10 gallon batches with a 15 but everything gets filled to the top and boil overs are almost impossible to keep from happening

if your splitting your beer into 2 fermentors you need 1/2 of a gallon more in each to account for yest and trub left over, so your probably not putting 10 gallons in the fermenter, more like 11 to yield 10 gallons of beer
 
As stated above, the short answer is no.
You do have some options though...
You could do a concentrated boil and dilute in your fermentors.
Or, add DME towards the end of the boil and top up to nearly the top of your pot to end up with 9.5 gal or so going to the fermentors. ETC.

The beauty of home brewing is the inventive and creative side.
Play around with it and have some fun!
In the end you have beer! :mrgreen:
Brian
 
It definitely isn't ideal, but I have been basically doing this ever since going all-grain.
My mash tun can hold 30l., so after sparging, I end up with about 29l. of wort for a standard (~6°ABV) beer.
The bummer is, I've only got a 20l. pot. :cry:
So, I just do an 18l. boil and add more hops to compensate for the reduced utilization.
 
You can also boil a concentrated wort, adjusting for hop utilization as SBAClimber says, then dilute with water to the gravity or volume you want. It's how most of us start anyway. Say you did an 8 gal boil, winding up with 6.5 gal wort, then added back 3.5 gal water (most say boiled and cooled, in most cases tap water run through an activated charcoal filter to remove chlorine works just fine), you get 10 gal wort from a 10 gal pot.
 
Is it possible to all grain brew with a 10 gallon kettle and end with 10 gallons of wort in the fermentor?

mashing is a different story, might have to mash in a cooler?
 
Thank you all very much for your awesome and speedy responses
 
I am at the moment sitting with the same problem. My wife bought me a brand new stainless steel brewpot with spigot and everything for my birthday. Only problem is the volume of the pot is only 25l. So started with 22l and had a boil over when I added 1st hops. My old system, using an old, wide aluminium jam pot yielded 18l from a boil volume of 26l, and I dont want to end with less in my FV than that with my new pot. I also dont want to tell my wife that she bought me a crap pot. I was thinking of establishing my boil volume loss and then working on my recipe so that I can add water to FV to say 19 or 20l? Id this advisable or should I just make peace with less beer after a brew?
 
a lot of extract brewers add top off water to get to the finished volume. the extract recipe is formulated to give a certain gravity at the finished volume, so adding top off water gets them to both the right volume and gravity. there is no reason an all grain brewer couldn't do the same thing, as long as you take into account the gravity of the wort. extract brews are pretty much guaranteed to finish at the right gravity, because the amount of sugars in the extract is known. in an all grain batch, the amount of sugars depends on how good your efficiency is. you may find that you need to use more grain than normal, or add a bit of extract to compensate if using less water is lowering your efficiency. it might take a couple tries to figure out exactly how much you need to adjust your recipes by, but other than that, and taking into account hop utilization, the beer should be fine. there are some drawbacks, such as increased Millard reactions resulting in a darker beer, and the decreased hop utilization, but extract brewers have those drawbacks, and still make good beer.
 
I use dilution to control variation in my boil. I work outside in Colorado and it always seems the wind waits until the boil starts to whip up. So oftenI boil off too much water to compensate for the wind, no big deal. Add a bit of water. I was also having this problem when I was decoction mashing - the initial gravity would be too high due to higher than expected conversion. The formula's pretty easy: V1/V2=G1/G2 where G1 and G2 are the gravity readings minus the 1 (1.055 becomes .055, or 55 if you want to use "gravity points"). So if you know your gravity, what you want your gravity to be and the volume of wort you have, the formula becomes V2=V1-V1*G1/G2. Yes, it can be simplified algebraically: V2=V1*(1-G1/G2) but it's more intuitive as shown above. And yes, it works the other way, too. You can find out how much to boil off using the same formula.
 
I just about used calculus on your "less is more" comment on another thread but thought better of it....
 
More questions. Sorry. :shock: I understand the less is more and that 10l of quality brew is better then 30l of crap. But will it work if, when I knew my boil loss will be 4liter, to dial in a boil loss of 2l in my recipe and then add 2liter of water at say 15min during the boil? Does the recipe calculator work with the full boil volume when calculating hops utilization or does it take into consideration that by the time I add my aroma and flavour hops 2l or so of water has been boiled off?
 
Here's the one thing I can say with great certainty: The amount of sugar in your wort will remain constant through the boil. What that means is if you boil off 2l and add back 2l, you'll have the same wort you started with (ignoring the impurities in the water and the small amount of sugar combined with amino acids). As to the recipe builder, I doubt it's sophisticated enough to do the things your question implies you want to do but here's the deal: The human palate is only sensitive to differences of about 5 IBU. So the difference in utilization you're talking about, say between a 30 l boil and a 28 l boil is insignificant in terms of flavor at homebrew scale.
 
Another minor thought from the "Zen Brewer" in me. The recipe builder is a great tool to calculate numbers, but it is mainly a guide. Any fine tuning of your recipe is best done by taste. Your taste especially. If you final beer tastes right to you then it is. I may want it to taste differently, and who knows what Nosybear would do. You want more hop flavor? Add more hops. It doesn't matter if that addition effects the numbers calculated in the recipe builder. The builder will get you in the neighborhood, then its up to you.
 
oh yes so many things can change a beers flavor that its really a guessing game at first then fine tuning come later lol

Ive found a huge difference in taste just changing the yeast let alone the hops
 
Yeast is the greatest contributor to flavor, believe it or not. Hops are second with the caveat if you're making a hop-forward beer, hops will dominate malt, which is largely a function of yeast used.
 

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