adding water at differentpoints in the brew

[olie]

Starting to realise I should have bought a bigger pan than 10 litres, but for now wondering how much beer I can still make in it (using brew in a bag). Is there any reason not to top up the water after mashing and removing the bag, before boiling?

also, how much can you top the brew up in the fermenter before pitching yeast?

what impact does topping up at either point have on flavour/ strength?

thanks

 

[pittsy]

hi , most people who Biab use a smaller pot than they are brewing with . Yes a bigger pot would be better but you can do it with a 10l pot , still use the correct amount of grain for a 23l brew and do however much water you can then drain out and refill at temp of 75c and let stand for 20 mins , poss do this another time again till you have around 18 plus liters . Now you will have to boil the wort but have to do 2 boils and add more hops cuz the smaller the boiling volume the more hops needed if adding water later.Then add water to make up to 23l , as long as you extracted the sugars ok from the grains then you should still hit your brew target

 

[olie]

thanks for the answer, but I don't want to get into a multiple brew process at this stage. Happy to make small-ish batches often rather than 23l ones, but would like something more than the 2.5 litres I ended up with first time round!

Is there any problem topping up after mashing to replace what you loose to the grain? would it dilute the wort? and what percentage is it reasonable to top up in the fermenter?

 

[pittsy]

ok , to clear things up here , if you was all grain brewing with a mash tun what you do is fill up once then wait for 60 plus mins etc then empty then refill either by batch sparge or fly sparge so what you are doing is getting the sugars out at least twice maybe three times and using a 22l mash tun with 5 kg of grain (my set up) i end up with around 30 l of wort ready to boil ending up with around 23l brew .
Now your set up is 10 l so that only really limits how much you can boil and not how much you can mash or even end up with .
So you want to end up collecting around 12l ish from the mash (and this could be a high og so adding water later will bring it to correct og ) and boil with around 8 l in your pot and use the other 4 l to top up while boiling , then add to fv along with water to get your total :thumb: