How to go from Extract to AG for < $10.00

[sbillings]

A big advantage of having the grain in a bag is the clean-up. Removing the grain from the mash tun is like taking a teabag out of a cup.

Good to see you up here, Sean (Guild). Haven't seen you up on the boards in a while.

I set up an Irish board www.irishcraftbrewer.com with a friend and have been spending most of my time there. The hobby really needs promoting in Ireland. Still no walk in homebrew shop in Dublin, but we have a new Irish net based supplier with a better range of stock than we have ever had in this country.

[T2]

Hello,

I am a new user from Norway. I just want to give you a link to a similar system.

(..eh which I will do in the next reply since newbies cannot post links.)

Foreign langauge yes, but pictures don't lie. Maybe this will give you some new ideas.

In this setup you brew, cool and ferment in the same vessel. I do not use this myself, but those who do are very pleased with it, especially the simplicity in use and that it does not take up a lot of space.

T2

[T2]

Here they are

http://www.brygging.no/BryggingWeb/butikken.aspx
http://www.brygging.no/BryggingWeb/butikken.aspx


Cheers
T2

[Bugeater]

Wow! That's the high tech version of BIAB.




Wayne
Bugeater Brewing Company

[SpillsMostOfIt]

I'm no historian, but I think the Australian BIAB process evolved from an exercise to brew in a single vessel. A couple of blokes - I don't know if they still do this - took a couple of big food-grade plastic buckets and used them to make a mash tun. The innermost bucket had a gaggle of holes drilled in the bottom to make it a colander, effectively replicating the above.

I think curtain material must have carried more sex appeal to the average Australian home brewer than two plastic buckets, but a stainless steel *anything* beats both of those hands down.

[Thirsty Boy]

T2 -

Those are pretty cool, I hadn't seen too many of those type of systems that were homemade before.

As Spillsmostofit says, the whole BIAB thing started out as an "All in One" idea using a couple of buckets. It was fairly quickly discovered that in your part of the world, people had been brewing in these systems for ages. And that really confirmed for people that its wasn't just some crackpot idea and the effort was going to give them a system that really worked.

I think a few people ended up constructing the system with two solid vessels, but probably just because it seemed a bit of an easier process to manage, the weight of enthusiasm seemed to go with the bag system.

Sibling -

The electric bucket is a pretty popular thing here in Oz as well. They are often referred to as a "Bucket of Death" because many of them are made by pulling apart a domestic kitchen kettle and doing a somewhat suspect job on the wiring... at least mine is anyway.

A few people have tried different mash and sparge type variations of the BIAB thing, including what you have been doing for a while. It seems that the - full volume - aspect of BIAB does "something" to the mashing process that helps with the efficiency. Not sure what or why, but it seems to help.

If you take a portion of it out to do a "Dunk Sparge" as per Spillsmostofit's method, you eek out a couple of % extra ..... but if you go all the way back to normal L:G ratios and sparging - then you start to loose it again, particularly with larger grain bills.

If you are up for an experiment, try doing a brew with ALL your water, sparge volume included, as your mash infusion. Perhaps with 20-25% of the water reserved for a sparge, but the vast majority in at the start. At least in my experience, even with a pretty "big" grain bill, you will still get efficiencies in the mid to high 70's % range.

Thanks for posting. Its good to hear that there are people out there who have been doing this for ages, I always thought there would be.

Cheers

Thirsty

[sbillings]

The electric bucket is a pretty popular thing here in Oz as well. They are often referred to as a "Bucket of Death" because many of them are made by pulling apart a commercial kettle and doing a somewhat suspect job on the wiring... at least mine is anyway.

My boiler is a commercial one, manufactured for homebrew: Pic:



But the thermostat turned out to be worse than useless, so I removed it and I replaced the power cable and element with better versions. That leaves the bucket and handle as the only original parts.

Provided quality parts are used and there is a decent seal where the element enters the bucket, I see no reason why a home made version should be any less safe than a commercial boiler.

They are very simple devices, after all.

If you are up for an experiment, try doing a brew with ALL your water, sparge volume included, as your mash infusion. Perhaps with 20-25% of the water reserved for a sparge, but the vast majority in at the start. At least in my experience, even with a pretty "big" grain bill, you will still get efficiencies in the mid to high 70's % range.

I might actually do something similar to what you suggest, for my next brew. I have wanted to do an IPA for a bit, but the sharp drop in efficiency I get with increased grist size makes it difficult.

I usually mash with 3L of water per Kg of grain, but maybe if I throw in 5.5Kg if grain with 20L, or more, of water (can't see myself fitting much more than that in the bucket, as it only has a volume of about 27L) and then batch sparge with the rest, I will get a bit more extract.

Doubt I'll get anything like my accustomed efficiency though. Last Saturday's Porter came out at 86% efficiency.

I will be upgrading to a larger boiler with two elements as soon as the work on my house is completed. I was going to get a cool-box mash tun too, but I'm not sure now.

[Thirsty Boy]

Pro-mash says that you will be "just" able to fit 5.5kg of grain and 23L of water in that 27L bucket.. just about a 4:1 ratio of L:G

Which is right at the upper reaches of "normal" mash L:G ratios and probably at or below the lower for BIAB. So it'll either work really well, or you will get the worst of both worlds... dunno???

Let me think - last really efficient "dunk sparge" brew I did was an IPA brewed with Spillsmostofit and we got 80+% with a 25litre batch and 6.9kg of grain. I believe we mashed in with all but about 6-8litres of our water which would have given us an L:G ratio of about 4:1... so you'll probably be OK.

5.5kg of grain and 23l of water in your bucket, would leave me with 20L after I pull the bag out and give it a bit of a squeeze.... "dunk sparge" in 6L of water, squeeze again... tip the 6L into your boiler for a pre-boil volume of 26litres giving you a post boil volume of 22L, lose a litre to trub and a litre to Fermenter goo...19 litres into the keg. Perfect.

One question... how big is your bag?? The recommendation we are making for the BIAB bags is that they should in NO WAY constrict the volume of the grain. The bag should be at least as big as the pot (my pot will just fit inside my bag) so that effectively, you are not actually mashing inside the constraints of the bag, you are mashing inside the pot like a normal brewer, your pot just "happens" to be lined by a bag. Anecdotally at least.. it made a huge difference to people's efficiency if they reduced the size of the bag much.

Just a thought anyway. If you have a smaller bag, maybe when you up your grain bill.. the bag starts to physically limit the grain. Which isn't so much of an issue when you use a smaller grain bill. That could be what is giving you the drastically lower efficiencies at higher grain bills, where we aren't particularly experiencing that.

Cheers and good luck with that IPA

Thirsty