Mashing pot

[Paul Stevenson]

I haven't made a full-grain mash before, and my largest pot is only 10 litres. Would it be best to only make a small mash in this pot by scaling down the ingredients? I'd like to make a 23 litre brew; can I make a mash in the 10 litre pot and simply add water to bring it up to 23 litres?

[Aleman]

Hi Paul,

Ideally you want to be looking at a mash tun of at least 15 if not 20L for a 23L brew of standard strength beer. If you think that 4Kg of grain occupies ~4.5L and then you add 10L of water for a normal thickness mash you can understand why it just wont work.

Of course you can scale back the recipes so that you are only producing 15L or you can mash twice combine the runnings and boil once, or make the mash produce 50% of the fermentables and use light extract to bring the gravity up.

[Andy]

If you think that 4Kg of grain occupies ~4.5L and then you add 10L of water for a normal thickness mash you can understand why it just wont work.

While that may be true of a dry volume of grain it's not a simple case of assuming that the mash volume will be 10L + 4.5L as the dry grain volume contains a large amount of air which bubbles to the surface during doughing in. If you put a recipe of 4kg grain using 10L of mash liquor into promash it comes out with a required mash volume of under 13L.

But yes, having some head space to play with in the tun is a good thing

[Reg]

You can use a stock pot.... ...but you may have to consider the size of your final brew.

http://jimsbeerkit.co.uk/forum/viewtopi ... +test+brew

[bandit]

Or you could just have a go and see what happens. Half the beauty of this noble art is just trying and trying again. One day it all starts to make sense and the joy of beer comes through and everything is good again.