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I was sitting here and stuff when a thought just suddenly jumped into my head... Can you add water to the boil kettle after you take the grains out of the mash to make up a 10 gallon boil? Or am I just being silly?

It can be done but you'd have to account fo the dilution of your OG in the inital mash

You'd be better off taking the extra water and doing a dunk sparge or something similar before adding it to your kettle. It would at least rinse some extra sugar from the wort.

If you do the cooler BIAB method you could simply drain your cooler into your kettle, then rinse the grain with the remaining water and empty that into your kettle. You wouldn't have to vorlauf like you would with a traditional mash, so it would add very little time to the process. ~168* water is not needed for the sparge - read up on "cold" water sparging, the extraction is very similar to a 168* sparge..I'd likely sparge with hot tap water if I wanted to do a 10g BIAB with my cooler setup.

Didn't know the sparge is not required to be at that temperature. That will save me some time for sure.

I usually sparge with gasoline. Gets better efficiency.

Jimmy wrote:If you do the cooler BIAB method you could simply drain your cooler into your kettle, then rinse the grain with the remaining water and empty that into your kettle. You wouldn't have to vorlauf like you would with a traditional mash, so it would add very little time to the process. ~168* water is not needed for the sparge - read up on "cold" water sparging, the extraction is very similar to a 168* sparge..I'd likely sparge with hot tap water if I wanted to do a 10g BIAB with my cooler setup.

So, building my setup and shopping around for a cooler MT. I'd like to future proof a bit and am wondering about 10g batches using the cooler biab method. My understanding is that for five gallon batches a ten gallon cooler is fine. Would it be worthwhile to setup a larger MT initially or would simply sparging with the added volume do? Is there a point where the grain bed would get too big to adequately mash for 10g in a smaller vessel?

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from what I understand, if your cooler MT is too big, there's a greater chance for heat loss due to the large headspace, but... you can compensate by covering your grain bed with aluminum foil to retain the heat, and/or reducing the amount of dead airspace above the grain

I have the opposite example, sort of. I typically brew 1 gallon batches (2 gal. in the MT) in a 5 gal. cooler. Pre-heat the MT if possible and cover with tin foil. Profit.

adams81 wrote:

Jimmy wrote:If you do the cooler BIAB method you could simply drain your cooler into your kettle, then rinse the grain with the remaining water and empty that into your kettle. You wouldn't have to vorlauf like you would with a traditional mash, so it would add very little time to the process. ~168* water is not needed for the sparge - read up on "cold" water sparging, the extraction is very similar to a 168* sparge..I'd likely sparge with hot tap water if I wanted to do a 10g BIAB with my cooler setup.

So, building my setup and shopping around for a cooler MT. I'd like to future proof a bit and am wondering about 10g batches using the cooler biab method. My understanding is that for five gallon batches a ten gallon cooler is fine. Would it be worthwhile to setup a larger MT initially or would simply sparging with the added volume do? Is there a point where the grain bed would get too big to adequately mash for 10g in a smaller vessel?

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I think the 70qt cooler is a good trade off between 5 & 10g batches. It's big enough to do full volume (no sparge) BIAB for 5g batches, and will also allow you to brew the 10g batches if you add a "sparge" step to the process.

Jimmy wrote:I think the 70qt cooler is a good trade off between 5 & 10g batches. It's big enough to do full volume (no sparge) BIAB for 5g batches, and will also allow you to brew the 10g batches if you add a "sparge" step to the process.

Just a heads up—I find that my 70qt cooler maxes out at around a 1.065 to 1.070 beer for 10 gallon batches (with a sparge, 1.33at/lb mash thickness).

70 qt sounds like the perfect compromise between 5 and 10g for me then! Thanks



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I like the way it's been working..sleepyjamie uses the same cooler and I believe a few others on here do as well.