My wife, AKA Mrs Santa, purchased a GasOne BP32 kettle for me for Xmas. It looks pretty cool, and will make things much easier I think with a built in thermometer. I am guessing I can now move into the All Grain Brewing? Any tips or tricks for those of you who might have this kettle? I am already looking forward to using it. Thanks. Dino
Merry Christmas. You could try BIAB with that kettle. Here is a good tutorial:
PS. 8 gallons (32 qt) might be a little bit small for a 5 gallon batch BIAB unless you hold back some mash water and do a dunk sparge or just top up the fermenter after boil.
Here is a BIAB Calculator:
Nice! definitely do your research and read everything you can and ask all the questions you can think of.
Nice score. One tip if you are going to BIAB is not to use the attached thermometer. The probe end can puncture/rip your bag. Get a plug for that hole and use a thermopen for taking temps.
I agree. I removed the thermometer from my boil kettle. It really wasn’t very useful in my process.
Note: if you choose to remove it and insert a plug, by cautious! Stainless steel can, and most likely will, gall. Meaning, a burr will build up in the thread and literally fuse the male and female threads together. I have had great success avoiding this condition by using a high quality Teflon tape when making stainless pipe joints.
It depends on the thermometer. The one shown in the pictures does stick in pretty far, and if the end is sharp it can tear the bag. If a shorter one with a rounder tip is used it might be fine. I have a thermometer that sticks into my kettle by about an inch and it has never caused a problem for my bag.
Thanks for the replies all. I looked at one recipe and it said the heat up 1.25 quarts per pound of grain. That would put me at about 4.5 gallons to start with. Then it said to rinse the grains after and not have more than 6.5 gallons to do the boil. I think I am still ok with that, right?
Also, my thought was, if possible, to add the water and steep the grains in the kettle. Drain the wort into another vessel, clean out the kettle and add the wort back in and do the boil. Then, cool the wort, drain into my fermenter and go as usual. My thought is, the false bottom will help strain some of the hop material out of the wort as it goes into the fermenter. Is this not a good idea? I was really hoping that this would be a nice all in one setup, but now I am thinking it isn’t. I am still going to figure out a way to use it, but looking for the guidance of the experts. Thoughts?
To me the 1.25 quarts per pounds is just how the last person brewed it but you can change that. I do everything in the 1.6 range because that’s comfortable on my system. No sparge BIAB do 3+ quarts per pound.
There many calculators available to help you get the volumes right.
+1. I use closer to 2 qt per lb for the mash.
Got it, but I am wondering if my other idea will work. If I put the grain in, do the mash, empty the wort into another pot, sparge the grain, then empty and clean the kettle of grain and pour the wort in and do the boil, will that work? Then the false bottom and screen on the drain will catch the hop matter.
Pouring liquid from vessel to vessel sounds like it will pickup unnecessary O2. For example: I fill from the bottom to ensure liquid is transferred below the liquid level of the BK or below the grain bed when mashing in or sparging. This can be as simple as high temp tube over the side gravity drained. It doesn’t eliminate O2 pickup but it reduces splashing.
IMO, you’re better off a) doing BIAB in a one pot system, b) using this kettle as a mash tun and using a separate boil kettle, or c) buying/making a mash tun if you want to use this kettle as your boil kettle. I used a blue rectangle cooler fashioned into a MLT gravity drained into my BK for years. I still use gravity to add sparge liquor from my HLT below the grain bed in my MLT.
I shoot for 1.5 quarts/lb of grain and it seems my mash efficiency is better. Years ago when I started making my ESB, Ray Daniel’s book said to do a thick mash in the neighborhood of 1 qt/lb, for an ESB. I did that for a while but found that my efficiency went way down. So I now use 1.5 qts/lb for that beer.
I think you would prefer to have a second vessel in that case for boiling. Holding everything on the side while you clean the mash tun so it can then serve as boil kettle will probably annoy you since it will slow your brew day down. That back and forth may also lead to hot side oxidation. Although, I don’t personally worry to much about that. Many do.
That’s pretty interesting (and confusing). I wonder what his reasoning is for that??
In those days it was thought that a thicker Mash didn’t convert as much and therefore left more body to the beer
Thanks for the explanation.
If I understand, you’re saying it was thought that a thicker mash produced a “noticeably less fermentable” wort. (Paraphrase is all mine).
In doing some looking around, some recipe’s call for the full amount of water to go in to the kettle, then add the grans. Assuming the full amount for a 5 gallon batch is 6.5 gallons, then add say 12lbs of grain, that would probably overflow my kettle, right? I am thinking of moving to the 10 gallon kettle. I like the idea of the false bottom and the filter on the end of the ball valve to strain any hop matter before it goes into the fermenter, but wondering if that is really needed. Shoot, and here I thought I had a pretty cool gift. LOL.
You do have a pretty cool gift. There are various ways to work around full volume. A few mentioned by others above.
Don’t read a recipe and think you have to mimic the author’s every process and ingredient. Recipes should contain SG, FG, bittering reference, grain percents, hops: AA and their schedule, yeast used, mineral concentrations post boil, etc. You’ll have to make adjustments based on your system’s performance and ingredients available such as increase/reduce grain, adjust hop qty based on higher/lower AA, increase/reduce starting water volume, etc. How you get there on your system will have to be adjusted to get the results the author used to get there on their system.
One word of caution: that screen can get clogged with trüb so take steps to avoid getting stuck. That false bottom will help as will a hop spider or bags and even post boil whirlpool.
BTW, to end up with 5 gal in a keg you’re going to need to account for all losses to get starting volume. I believe 6.5 gal won’t be enough after accounting for fermenter loss, boil off, grain absorption, vessel dead space, etc. I start with 9 gal for my avg batch in a three vessel system with pump and hose loss. You’ll learn your system over time. I use even more starting volume for batches with more grain.
I’m starting to think more about this and thinking if I can use the kettle I have, mash maybe 4 gallons and then sparge for the rest up to the amount needed, would that work? So, assuming I am talking BIAB style, for example, and this is only hypothetical for numbers, if I mashed with say 5 gallons at say 150 for about 60 minutes with a final liquid amount of say 4.5 gallons, took the grains and rinsed with another 2 gallons and added that to the kettle for a total of 6.5 gallons. I could now use my kettle for the boil and might be ok. Just thinking out loud here, so humor me as a newbie. RR
That is in the right ballpark.