increase the size of batch

[Brewer #73650]

Hi guys,

I have a boil kettle of 17L and some fermenters that can hod up to 20L. I am able to boil until now only around 11L at maximum. I am thinking of increasing this with the instruments that I have at the moment. I've read about it on the internet how to do it, but beter opinions from somebody who maybe did it already.
So, creating a recipe for 19L, use the ingredients for 19L, use less water than needed, do the mash, boil until I got the 11L.
Now comes the tricky question. I should add 7-8L of boiling water 10 min before finish the boiling then just continue with the process, or add the sterile water to the fermentation tank on top of the wort. What method shuold do better? Or just better leave it as it is until buy a bigger recipient.

Cheers,

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

that just called a partial mash its fine, in fact I just did it and the extra water I added to a bucket and put in the freezer to almost freezing and that cooled the wort down to 80 without chilling

 

[Mark D Pirate]

You can do it as a partial mash or as a over concentration full mash
Partial mash is far easier as you use either liquid or dry malt extract to the wort at flame out to add the rest of the sugars needed to hit your target gravity

 

[Brewer #73650]

that just called a partial mash its fine, in fact I just did it and the extra water I added to a bucket and put in the freezer to almost freezing and that cooled the wort down to 80 without chilling

from what I've read the best is the water to boil with the wort for complete mixing ingredients. But not sure the exact experienced people what have too say, what differences are.
Cheers,

 

[Brewer #73650]

You can do it as a partial mash or as a over concentration full mash
Partial mash is far easier as you use either liquid or dry malt extract to the wort at flame out to add the rest of the sugars needed to hit your target gravity

Sorry, no liquid or dry malt extract around here. I have to do a all grain.
I might give it a go and see what's gonna come out. Anyway, learning it's the key. Just trying to add the most possible options and do it the right way.

Cheers,

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

I have a 5 gallon pot I use for making yeast and i was lazy one day and mashed all the grain it would take for a 6 gallon batch in that pot then just added filtered water with the ph adjusted down added a Camden tablet too then chilled it and Im drinking the beer now, its fine

 

[J A]

I've used this method to brew larger batches for splitting. Basically brewing a 5.5 gallon batch to a higher gravity and diluting in the bucket to 7 gallons of wort at the desired gravity and splitting into two 3.5 gallon batches . You have to be aware of increased hop uptake in the higher-gravity wort so that hop bitterness and flavor profile may be slightly different than it would be, but the difference shouldn't be too great.
The other thing that will change is that efficiency may go down as a result of sparging less.

 

[Mark D Pirate]

Decreased hop utilisation as gravity rises ....
Need more hops as you get less IBUs per gram

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

correct, I added twice the hop and earlier, so in the batch since it took a long time to boil I just added the hops in the cold water before the mash and let it ride all the way through the boil, since it was a 1 hop beer it worked perfect, exactly the taste I was looking for but Ive done this many times so I know what to expect

 

[J A]

Decreased hop utilisation as gravity rises ....
Need more hops as you get less IBUs per gram

I got it backwards....it always throws me off until I start plugging variables in to the calculator.

 

[KC]

I do reiterated mashes fairly often. Take a full grain bill and split it in two bags. Mash the first bag per schedule, then mash the second bag in the same wort at the sacc. rest. Dilute to your target gravity after the boil. With a basic equation for diluted concentration you can hit target gravity spot on every single time. The repeated mash steps make for a longer brew day. You do get a slight drop in mash and hop efficiency, but the BF calculator takes those into account during recipe design.

You can recover some of the lost mash efficiency if you have a second container to dunk sparge. Boil that separately or refill the main boil kettle as the wort boils down.

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

if you have your water right and a little more isn't a bad thing just boil longer but what I did when I was brewing in a bag was fill two buckets up with the remaining water then dunk sparge in both then pour both back into boil, very good efficiency when doing that but sanitation is a must