I am working more and more with all grain brews and I had a couple questions about doing 5 gallon brews on my keggle system. I purchased this system a while back and generally use it for bigger brews but I would like to do 5 gallon brews.
My Mash Tun has a false bottom in it. I find that it takes about 3 gallons to fill the keggle to the top of the false bottom. Does this mean that for every recipe I should increase the amount of water for mashing by 3 gallons?
Will this extra water negatively affect my brews?
Is there a better method/tool for mashing other than a false bottom? I have seen some hose setups, forget the name.
You could pop the false bottom out and do brew in a mash tun, or you could do no sparge/full volume mash batches. You might need to play around with your grind or add more grain to hit your numbers though.
Does your tun have a dip tube that draw from below the false bottom? If so, the amount left after draining is the extra or dead space. Hopefully it would be a quart or so.
This^^^ Fill your mash tun with a measured amount of water and drain it as you would while mashing. Collect that water and measure to determine what the dip tube leaves behind.
I have a three keggle system and do five gallon batches all the time. But earlier this year I started using the BIAB method for these smaller batches and it works quite well.
My false bottom has about 2.5 gallons under it. For a five gallon batch, mash a little loose, 2 qt/lb should do it. Recirculate during the mash. It should work. The system Gordon Strong used for years was similar, and he often had published making 5 gallon net batches.
I’m not sure what your system looks like but I have a 3 tier with two burners, a cooler for mashing and I make 5 gallon batches all the time.
My hot water tank is a keggel. I typically have about 13 gallons of water to start for 5 gallon batch but I just make sure I have enough, sometimes I boil for longer than 60 minutes.
Depending on what I am making, grain weight wise, I multiply my grain weight by 1.25 to see how much water I need for mashing in the cooler.
I mash 60 minutes and then vorlauf until the mash clears up. Sometimes I add water while doing this because I don’t want to expose my grain bed to oxygen.
As I fill my boil kettle I rinse the grains with near boiling water.