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Make 23l Of High gravity wort, water down to 40 or 50litres.

kevino

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Hi All,

I have a grainfather where I can make around 25 litres of wort, and have a 50litre fermenter. So...
Im thinking of Making 23l Of High gravity wort, water down to 40 or 50litres. Can this be done? Has anyone tried something like this?
I thought of doing a reiterated mash, then watering down in the fermenter, and fermenting.
Would this be the best way? Would it work? Hops, Im guessing would need to be doubled too.  Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated.

Cheers, Kev.
 
Making higher strength wort requires extra mash capacity. Your grain amount and mash capacity would still need to fit the equivalent of 50 liter batch of regular beer.. you only save space on the boil  this way. I made a double strength beer once and watered it down. I could taste the dilution. Perhaps you won't. Currrently I have an all grain step mash, 3 pot s.s 15 gallon setup that can produce 46 liters of 5% beer, or 23 liters of 10% beer (trappist quad ale) which I just made last month. My mash tun limits (40 liter)  are maxed out more in the 10% case, so its actually a bit more than double quantity mash. 
 
twhitaker said:
Making higher strength wort requires extra mash capacity. Your grain amount and mash capacity would still need to fit the equivalent of 50 liter batch of regular beer.. you only save space on the boil  this way. I made a double strength beer once and watered it down. I could taste the dilution. Perhaps you won't. Currrently I have an all grain step mash, 3 pot s.s 15 gallon setup that can produce 46 liters of 5% beer, or 23 liters of 10% beer (trappist quad ale) which I just made last month. My mash tun limits (40 liter)  are maxed out more in the 10% case, so its actually a bit more than double quantity mash.

Thanks twhitaker for your post.
I was thinking along the same lines as what the extract brewers do. Make a hig gravity wort, and then watering down, maybe tweaking the hops / biterness a little to try and compensate. I might be pretty limited as you say with the equipment I got. So maybe would only be able to bump it up a little. I guess the best way to go, is to try a little at a time, and see how far I can go, and note the changes in body, bitterness etc as I increase...thanks for your help.
 
Hey Kev, I have exactly the same kit with the same idea! Did you try it?
 
Although I'm thinking of using the reiterated mash technique for the wort, then watering down with bottled water in the fermenter!
 
Hi, I have been looking into doing this too, but perhaps dilute with say 5l of filtered water to bump up the final volume in the fermenter.

What I had in mind was to edit the Grainfather brewhouse efficiency in BeerSmith to say 60% which would then give the accurate grain and hop measurements for a set recipe, enabling the intended OG to be hit with the additional water in the fermenter. May take some trial and error to get the efficiency % setting right.
 
It seems to me that the easier way to do this is to add in the 5 liters of water as top off into the fermenter.  BeerSmith should then figure the gravity from the boil to be higher from target to allow for that dilution.
 
dentonbirch said:
Although I'm thinking of using the reiterated mash technique for the wort, then watering down with bottled water in the fermenter!

Just going to try this technique in the next brew session, as I want to make an Imperial stout, which will be over 11kg of grain, and GF can only handle 9kg max, so am going to try re-iterated mashing.
First time for me, should be fun.
 
kevino said:
dentonbirch said:
Although I'm thinking of using the reiterated mash technique for the wort, then watering down with bottled water in the fermenter!

Just going to try this technique in the next brew session, as I want to make an Imperial stout, which will be over 11kg of grain, and GF can only handle 9kg max, so am going to try re-iterated mashing.
First time for me, should be fun.

Quick update - So I did end up doing my imperial stout finally....this weekend. Used reiterated mashing technique.
The overall process wasn't too bad, but did find the efficiencies suffered big time. Seems reiterated mashing is not good as hoped.
Although the higer gravity is worth it in some part, I did find the efficiencies suffered a good 18% loss in what was expected.
I usually get min of 75-85%, only achieved around 59%, so wont be using this technique again in a hurry.
 
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