(video) man that one guy is so fucking annoyingly dorky. He was in the demo video they sent with my kit too.

(video) Everything they're saying and doing is easy and awesome, very similar to what I do now, nothing strange or difficult at all. But... fuck 3 gallons. And fuck "5 gallons takes a while to go through." I literally go through 5 gallon batches in about 3 weeks, alone. I cannot keep up with my own drinking requirements. There's ZERO chance I would ever do 3 gallons, no fucking way. All the trouble, 3/5 the results.

Wow, I've always wanted to do this but never did because I thought it was too complicated. Now I see how wrong I was!

Anyhoo, good on you for making the attempt. I believe I'm on your mailing list for a couple bottles?

(vid finished) Yeah man, he's basically doing what I do now. 3 hours, easy cleanup, minimal gear, but I get 5 gallons because I also use DME. That makes me feel better about my sense that I was in a sweet spot.

I had no problem getting 4...and it was 1.060... I could have added a gallon of water and been at 1.048...
I think I could possibly handled a pound more of grain too. I could use your method of pouring some "sparge" water through the dripping add volume.
So I have some room to grow. But my kettle is 7.5... if you're on a 5 gallon kettle then maybe you would max out at 3.5-4 gallons when you're done.

No man 7 gallon kettle. But how do I use 10 or 11 pounds of grain in it?!

I think you can. I had 11 lbs. I filled mine to 6.25 and got in 11. There was a tiny bit of room left. You don't have to worry about boilover since it's not that hot while the grain is in. Though you are going to need a stronger/larger strainer to hold it above while you are done. That I know now.

If I were you, I would try filling to 5.75 of mash/sparge combo... and then doing that super long mash... raise it up and have some additional hot sparge water to do your rinse thing. Get your kettle up to six and go nuts. Have a spray bottle with water handy during your boil and don't look away.

Maybe I'll eat my words after I taste this batch but it appears successful.

Some numbers I found handy trying to calculate my own
1 lb grain occupies 0.32 quarts when saturated.
Each pound will retain .1 gallons of water after drip dried.

You are still mashing at a much higher water/grain ratio than you would be if you had a cooler. Typically with the cooler set up you could mash at 1.25 qts/lb... and with 5.75 I think you're at 2 qts/lb.

When you pull 11 lbs of grain out you will have lost 1.1 gallons of water. You should have around 4.65 gallons remaining. So have a gallon/gallon of a half of hot sparge water on the side. Do you're trickle down thing and I think you'd be set.

Worth a shot IMO.

I just did my third extract brew, a northern brewer black IPA kit. I'm going to try an BIAB when my primary fermenter is free. I've only got a 5 gallon pot though so not quite sure how well it'll work.

So just plan the % of grain to extract accordingly. In other words only do 2-3 lb's of grain in the mash, in 1-2 gallons of water (check me on that). Where in my 7 gallon pot I would normally mash 5 pounds of grain and add 3 or 4 lb's of extract to wind up with a 5% ABV beer, you could mash 3 pounds and add 6 lb's of DME. Something like that.

Two problems with that setup: I'd really need to be on the burner outsie, which is fine, but it's one more thing to go buy... my propane tank is low. Still, not a real big deal. Second issue is, though - if I'm full-boiling, I really really have to do water cooling. Cannot see a way to do that that doesn't either waste water or cause me a huge pain in the ass.

Tell me this: If you run a wort chiller through 5 gallons of 212 degree liquid, how long does it run for to get down to 80F? If it's like 2 minutes I could probably do it. If it's ten minutes, that's a shitload of wasted water unless I go get a rain barrel or something. And I know about the washing machine trick, but plumbing that in might be a pain up there in the laundry room...

It can generally take a while.
If you are planning on brewing two or more batches, you can use most of it for that, or use it to sanitize equipment.
You can also try using a fountain pump in conjunction with an ice bath, but then you need a lot of ice.
You chill the wort in a bath of tap water to get the temp down to somewhere between 100 and 125F and then pump the ice water through wort chiller do get it down the rest of the way.

I want to, like, freeze giant cylinders of ice and just put those directly into the wort as it sits in the sink bath.

A lot of people put the wort chiller in the last 15 min of the boil..to sanitize it. Seems like a good trick. BUT it's heating up that whole time. If you were to put it in the first 15 minutes of the boil you could take it out and let it cool...before entering the wort... making it effective quicker. Still...it's going to take you 20 minutes to cool...and that IS a lot of water. I don't really have a good solution to this. I'm thinking about it though.

I think you're onto something with ice cylinders. some sort of 2 liter bottles that could simultaneously withstand boiling on one side and freezing on the other. There's got to be a way.

How about a small stainless pot...filled with water/froze a day or two ahead of time. Just a giant ice cube.

I LIKE that.

Some kind of boil-safe plastic bag... fill it with water, freeze it (or two of them, etc), then put them into the pot along with a bath.

got to make sure it doesn't tip into the wort...and got to make sure the outside of that thing is sanitized...
but it is going into boiling liquid.... most of what's on the outside won't survive.

I wish it was solid/or welded airtight shut...so that the water could never leave...and you could just dunk it in there.
I really don't know if it would work at all.

Oh that's the dream. Let's get rich.

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http://www.knfcorporation.com/3cookbag.htm
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The President of my homebrew club advised me to do something like this when I started home brewing. It speeds up the amount of time needed to chill the wort without a proper wort chiller and eliminates one of the steps in extract brewing.
I boiled two gallons of water in my brewing pot, put it in sanitized plastic bowls with lids and froze them overnight on the eve of my brewing date. I made quite a mess the first time, I casually dropped them into the hot wort, but it worked quite well when I started using my swamp cooler bucket for the ice bath.
I wouldn’t want to submerge anything into hot wort that wouldn’t inevitably be part of the beer, even if it was fully sanitized, but that is just me.
It seemed like an effective method, but I prefer to chill two gallons of distilled water in the fridge while I am brewing and simply add it to the fermenting bucket before I add the chilled wort. It doesn’t take much besides two bags of ice and frosty cold distilled water to bring the temperature down to 68 F.

Ok so the steps you (Prom) would advise are, roughly:

SEVERAL DAYS OUT (or just all the time): Make and store a shitload of ice.
DAY OF: Pour 3 gallons or so into something(s), and put that something(s) in the fridge hours and hours ahead of time so it chills to appx 40F.
END OF BOIL: Dump all of that cold water and all of that ice into the wort in combination with a chill bath (they slayed at coachella)

?

I’ll just detail my usual brewing process and include the frozen water process as well.

Night before:
1. Clean and sanitize kitchen
2. Boil two gallons of water
3. Sanitize two reusable plastic bowls with lids that hold roughly one gallon of water a piece
4. Add water to bowls, place in freezer over night

Brew day:
1. Remove Yeast smack pack from refrigerator as soon as I wake up.
2. Sanitze kitchen one more time
3. Lay out all my equipment
4. Go purchase two bags of ice
5. Brew
6. Place brewing pot in swamp bucket ice bath, add one block of ice in wort immediately
7. Allow wort to drop down to 100, place one block of ice in primary fermenter, and add wort.
8. Aerate wort in swamp bucket and allow it to chill down to 68F
9. Pitch yeast and place in closet.

Brewing process skipping the frozen water
1. Purchase Four gallons of distilled/R/O water
2. Clean and sanitize kitchen the night before
3. Remove yeast smack pack as soon as I wake up
4. Place two gallons of distilled/R/O water in fridge
5. Sanitize kitchen one more time
6. Go purchase two bags of ice for ice bath
7. Brew
8. Place brewing pot in swamp bucket ice bath, one bag of ice with cold tap water
9. Let it drop down to 100 and add other bag of ice to bucket
10. Add two gallons of distilled/R/O water to primary fermenter and then add wort
11. Aerate wort in swamp bucket and allow it to chill down to 68F
12. Pitch yeast and place in closet.

Had good success yesterday with Batch 12, a scotch ale. The closet is now at maximum capacity...



On the left is the explosive porter, in the center the new scotch ale, and on the right the marathon-bubbling gluten free breakfast beer. That gf one just keeps gently but steadily bubbling, no increase or decrease in rate, since saturday night. It's kinda incredible.

So for the scotch, I backed off at the last minute with the DME and only ("only") used 6 lb's of it in conjunction with the 5 lb's of grain. Aiming for 7% or so instead of a 10% monster that would need 6 months to be good. Anywho, here was the genera run down:

- Steeped the 5 lb's of grain (including a half pound of beechwood smoked malt, might need to up that % next time, as it didn't smell QUITE as dreamy as I wanted it to) for 75 minutes or so on the higher end, 158-160 or so, to get longer sugar chains and a sweeter beer appropriate for the style. Crystal malts should help there too.
- Sparged with 170F to stop the action.
- Boil volume was 3 gallons to start, boiled for over an hour and a half (also style-correct) and got it down to 2.5 gallons.
- Added nothing but the Centennial hops I've had in the freezer for 8 (?) months... shouldn't have ordered a full pound of those but I didn't know how bitter sorghum is, so when I assumed the GF batches would be helping me use all these hops up, I was wrong. The centennial has lost some kick and spice, but I just used more of it. My scale batts are dead, so I'm guessing it was about 2 ounces for 90 minutes, then another 2 for 30 minutes and another 2 for 15. Smelled right, not TOO hoppy but it was there.
- Cold sink bath with big frozen shipping bricks from work (30 ounces of frozen water in a foam brick inside a plastic form) outside the pot, tons of ice into the pot plus cold water up to 5.25 gallons or so, and that thing was down to 89F in 5 minutes. I am HAPPY with that. I can do that. And I wasted very little water. By the time I aerated and pitched, it was 87.
- Yeast... two packets of dry (1 california ale, one mystery ale, both SafAle brand) the usual way I've described before. ten minutes after I put them into the coffee mug they had foamed the napkin clear off... I don't even need to do ANYTHING really until I'm cooling the beer down, it's crazy. But I do it 3 or 4 hours sooner just in case.
- Carboy got a blowoff hose into a huge mugh with 3 inches of sanitzier water, no fucking around this time.

And it's been bubbling happily since an hour after I pitched. Once again, the yeast method seems to be working incredibly well. And that's DRY yeast, the cheapest kind you can get. Once the scotch slows down I will age on the remainder of the bourbon soaked charred oak cubes.

Oh and my porter is already done... it was done really like yesterday morning, so 3 days. Wtf? Spec grav is now at target, 1.022 vs a normal 1.020 for a porter. I'll have to bottle it soon. Man, those nottingham yeast went through it FAST.

what is gluten free beer like?

Well, it's beer-esque, without exactly being beer. There are 2 routes to making gf beer: 1) Don't use gluteny ingredients, or 2) make regular beer and use a brand new commercial enzyme that "breaks" the gluten proteins down into something else, rendering the finished beer gluten free but otherwise very much normal beer. Route 2 would be awesome sauce if they'd sell homebrewers the enzyme. As of today they do not, it's brand new and only being used by a handful of people that I know of. Additionally, in the US the FDA says you can only label something "Gluten Free" if you followed Route 1, which is retarded. If tests show no gluten, then... it's gluten free. See also: Estrella Daura from Spain, made this way, gluten free but cannot be labeled as such. Anywho, all I can do is Route 1.

So that means for each 5 gallon batch I use a base of sorghum extract (6 lb jug of syrup, usually, which is half a gallon). On top of that I use a small 8 oz bag of rice syrup solids and another of maltodextrine to thicken it up a little. Then I use dried yeast because the liquid ones are usually in a gluten solution. Sorghum doesn't taste like barley, it tastes a little more bitter, and it doesn't taste awesome. So from what I've learned, trying to highlight the flavor of sorghum is a dead end road and a mistake. The goal for my gf brewing has become "create a good sideshow" and keep the whole thing in the realm of beer flavors. Results so far:

1. Pale Ale. This one I hopped like anormal pale, and it was way too bitter and astringent. Learned not to use bittering hops of any kind, period.
2. Pale Ale V2. Better, and I used orange peel zest too plus dry hopping so it was more acceptable and "beery" without being too bitter, but wasn't something non-glutards would ever consider drinking.
3. Raspberry. Used half the sorghum this time (appx 3 lb's), and then cooked down 3 lb's of organic raspberries in a small pot / cooled them / pitched into the fermentor after the sorghum had fermented for 3 or 4 days. I used MAYBE 1 ounce of hops at the end of the boil (total boil time like 10 minutes... there's no point in doing anything but sanitizing), and then the raspberries hit it a few days later and got their fermentation on. This was pretty good, actually. Very close to being a lambic, great berry smell and flavor, good blend of sweet and bitter, not bad.
4. Breakfast Beer. Still bubbling in the primary. I roasted oats myself on a baking sheet til they were toasted and wonderfully brown, ditto some brown rice too. Mashed both about about 155 for half an hour, boiled in all 6 lb's of sorghum, pitched maybe an ounce of centennial hops in at the end, and used the usual dried ale yeast. Then I peeled and cooked down an apple and added that to the primary, and it smells like an awesome breakfasty beer, if that makes any sense. Can't wait to try it.