Anybody here do Brew in a Bag method?

General Homebrew Discussion
1

I’m looking for some info on this technique for my NHC presentation.  If you’ve done it, let me know.

2

I did it with two beers
I can send you the info over the weekend…recipe, what my normal gravity would have been over what it was with BIAB and anything else I/you can think of.

3

That would be great.  Be sure to let me know how much water you used…that seems to be one thing that most of the writeups don’t mention.

4

Your strike/dough in water, is every last drop of water that you will put in the whole batch. Its all the water that would normally go in at strike, all the water for any infusions and all that water that would normally be used to sparge. ALL of it. As an example. in this batch we were looking for a pre-boil volume of 27.3 litres (7.2 gallons) and were using 6.45kg (14.2lb) of grain. So accounting for absorption by the grain, our total water needed was 35litres (9.25gal) and thats how much we mashed in with. The Full Volume.

from: Beer Forum • View topic - How to go from Extract to AG for < $10.00

this spreadsheet has some info too:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ar51P4gKYE7wdHJnV1UxZS1kVkZEV19iUFF0U3lZUHc&hl=en

5

Thanks, man.  That’s what I though, but none of the references I’d found so far confirmed it.

EDIT:  The BN link was what I had looked at before, but just missed the water amount. Thanks again!

6

I’m usually half in the bag when I’m brewing…does that count?

7

In the immortal words of Firesign Theater, “Only to 10, Mudhead”.

8

For a while, I did a modified version of Brew-in-a-bag. I mashed in a 5 gallon pot with a paint strainer bag. After the mash, I dunked the strainer bag with the grains in another pot as a sparge. I then combined the two and brought it to a boil. This was for 3 gallon all-grain batches. However, it is a nice way for extract brewers to try all grain brewing since the only additional equipment they would need is a paint strainer bag. The technique is essentially the same as the one outlined here at HBT.

9

I have brewed 2 batches using the BIAB and have used about 1 gallon less water than what beersmith said and then my pre boil volume come out right because you don’t have all the dead spaces to worry about, and I crush my grains finer than usual because you don’t have to worry about a stuck sparge.

10

I’ve not tried it myself, but there is a hell of a lot of information and posts from people who have over on the AussieHomebrewer forum. This particular thread http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum//index.php?showtopic=11694&hl=BIAB will give you more information than you can possibly hope for.

11

I did it once for a 3-gallon stove-top batch for our club’s strange brew competition.  It worked fine, was fun to try, and I might do it again for small or experimental batches.  I got much lower efficiency than I do when I batch sparge - 60-65% vs. 80-85%.  I used the same kind of paint strainer bag that I use as a hop bag in my brew kettle.  The trickiest parts were stirring at mash-in, and removing the bag at the end of the mash without making a big mess in the kitchen.

12

That is actually one of the reasons I went ahead and built a 5 gallon mashtun for my 3 gallon batches. When using a paint strainer bag with a stovetop mash, I would make a big mess moving the paint strainer bag to another pot to sparge. Dumping out the grains was also a mess. Since I brew in my kitchen, I also didn’t like having grains flying around there since they are covered in bacteria and wild yeasts that can cause infection.

The other reason is that the pot lost too much heat during the mash. I would usually need to heat it up again in the middle. Now I usually lose less than a degree with my cooler mash tun.