![]() ![]() Since strike water is much lower volume that my boil volume, and much less than the total capacity of the kettle, so things should work out fine. Obviously when you put all of that grain into the water, the level is going to rise somewhat. Using calculators online for mash tun volume, and strike/sparge water, I was running into problems trying to get things to work out to get 34 pounds of grain into my kettle/fermentor. I am going to be "maxing out" the 15 gallon kettle that I have. I had mistakenly thought that "boil volume" was the same as "strike water". This were pieces of knowledge that I missed the first time around. A slightly more watery mash may be easier to mix and you may lose slightly less volume (proportionally) to trub. Essentially 5.5kg of grains seems to net me around 5L low wines at 25% abv regardless of initial volume. My limited experience with playing with my HBB mashes (and others since) is that within reason a few points either way have little effect on flavour. Ben (IIRC) sometimes includes a boil step in his wort production for whisky for sterilisation and to bump the SG slightly. The best thing is to choose your target SG and sparge until you reach it. If you sparge (for a true Scotch style whisky for example), then yes, each sparge is getting you a little more sugar, but a slightly lower SG. My initial conversion of HBB to metric fell foul of this and my first mash was fairly low gravity as a consequence. Often here the recipes are based on filling (with headspace) a certain size of fermenter, rather than listing the total volume of water. I've been caught out a few times by the difference between mash volume and water volume. If you do that without the bag and just dump the whole lot in the fermenter, then you have the most common on-grain method here. If you do full volume BIAB then you work out your total water volume (strike + sparge) and dump all of that in with your grains and then lauter to get your wort. This takes you to your pre-boil volume which you then boil for a given time to concentrate the wort and cook the hops. In general you mash in at a certain thickness (qt/lb, kg/l, bushels/cubic fathom?) and then when your mash is done, you sparge to rinse out the sugars that are still locked in the grains. When making beer, your strike water volume is rarely your total volume. Strike water is what you use to mash in (or to raise the temp in a step mash). Am I thinking about this correctly? Thanks. So with the sparge you are rinsing the grains, but also watering it down a bit. Meaning that if I were to measure the SG of just the strike water after steeping, and before sparge water is added, it would actually be much higher than final. So I am thinking that the programs like BeerSmith and Brewers Friend are calculating the final ABV on the TOTAL volume (after sparge water). I think some allow better or worse conversion, and feel free to let me know what you think is the best), and the strike water volume is much less then the total volume at the end. Looks like you can use whatever qt/lb you like (within reason. From what I am seeing in the strike and sparge water calculator, this is not true. I had thought that your strike water was essentially your batch size in the kettle, and when you remove the bag and squeeze (I am using BIAB), you just sparge back to what your total volume should be. ![]() From what I understand, I can either add sugar, or add more grain. I am looking to push it up a bit, only got 5.5% ABV last time. So I have been using BeerSmith and Brewers friend software to figure out what my expected ABV should be. And it appears I might have misunderstood a few things on my first attempt, and wanted to ask if I am thinking about this in the correct way now. So I need to scale up my previous recipe, and make a few other changes. I needed something a bit bigger, and their 15 gallon kettle/fermentor is a beast. I started with a 10 Gallon Anvil kettle/fermentor, and it is just not enough. It was a great experience, and I am looking to do another. ![]()
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