Midi Mash

Get advice on making beer from raw ingredients (malt, hops, water and yeast)
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purple_chicken

Midi Mash

Post by purple_chicken » Sun Oct 05, 2008 8:45 am

Hi all,
I'm just trying to get all the kit together to do my first AG brew when I noticed Daab's instructions for a mini - mash setup. I liked the Idea of the mini- mash as it seemed a lot easier to handle than trying to do a 5 or 10 gal for my first one. Also I can't do a full brew at the moment cause Ive not got all the kit together yet(boilers not big enough!). I was thinking that I could probably do a mini mash except a bit bigger lets say a 2.5 gallon brew with the kit that ive got at the moment.

Has anyone tried doing a half size brew? if so whats the best way of calculating grain amounts for the recipe, is it just a case of halfing the amounts used in a 5 gal brew?

Any other problems I might encounter?

rgds

Neal

Re: Midi Mash

Post by Neal » Mon Oct 06, 2008 10:53 am

Hi p-c,

I did a 10 litre brew a few weekends ago. Just a simple 2.5 kg of Pilsner malt + Saaz hops. It was really an experiment to see how lagers would turn out using bottled spring water.

All I did was halve a 4 gal recipe. Be warned though, keep an eye on evaporation if you're using a large boiler (I used the H&G 10gal) as it will make up a greater % of your final desired brew length than the 10 - 15% usual factored in on water calculations. Also, losses to dead space will make up a much larger proportions of your final brew length. I used 20L of water to get 9.5L of beer in the bottles.

I'd say I found it more hassle making a smaller quantity - partly because there's less payback at the end :( but if you only have the kit to do smaller volumes anyway, you might not encounter the problems I did.

Neal

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