Brew Dog Kit

[dandy]

A little advice would be most appreciated folks.

My first couple of brews were simple malt extract kits and the only grain kit I have used is the Brewdog Punk IPA kit which makes about 1 gallon.

I wanted to buy a similar kit for the Dead Pony Club (one of my favourite beers) and it comes in 20 litre size. First question is, how do you go about doing this kind of thing with a pot which only hold about 7 litres - do I need to get a bigger one or do you just top up the finished brew with cold water??

Second question - if you do top up, the logical thought would be, does this not just dilute the alcohol content of the overall brew if you are using less water than stated?? Obviously you top up a malt extract kit with cold water but you still have the same amount of malt extract as you started with. Surely with less water extracting the sugars from the grain you will end up with less concentrated wort???

And finally, the Punk IPA kit came with a one gallon glass carboy. If I go for the Dead Pony 20L kit, will it work just as well to pour the wort into a 23L plastic fermentation bucket or do you really need to go with glass carboys for all grain brews?

Thanks.

 

[dad_of_jon]

Evening.

1. you can use more pots, you dont have to boil the lot in a single pot
2. you'd want to sparge any mash you do as per instruction the instructions
3. you don't need to keep the wort in glass carboys, unless perhaps you were going to keep it in there for months... keep brews in clear glass covered from the light BTW.
4. good luck, relax and have a homebrew.

 

[gingerneil]

I brewed the Brew Dog Punk IPA grain kit recently - and that's what has got me back into homebrew! I only had a single 7l pot too, and brewing it was a nightmare - I even sanitised my washing up bowl and used that! I got about 4.5l out in the end - but it tasted great!
I am sure you could divide up a larger kit, but that would multiply up the time/effort etc. and you'd need to be very accurate with measurements. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I'd expect you'd want to buy some bigger kit!
I'm going with kit beers for now - but might give grain brewing a go again in future.

 

[dandy]

Got the punk bottled last week Neil so will see what it's like shortly. I too ended up with f**k all wort after boiling so ended up topping up with water. Hope the finished product is not too weak. Would love to give the Dead Pony a go but splitting the larger kit means an awful lot of work for what is required. Going to stick with the kits as well for the time being.

 

[Pavros]

You will only be able to split a large all grain kit if the malts are all bagged separately. If there is more than 1 malt in the kit and they are all mixed together, I wouldn't split it into smaller batches to brew at different times as you can't guarantee that you have the correct mix of grains.

 

[dandy]

Thanks Pavros.

 

[abacab666]

I've done a couple of the brew shop 1gal kits now and, although they turned out pretty good, it's a whole lot of hard work for 6 pints. Maybe one day I'll have enough space at home for full size all grain, but I think I'll stick to the extract for now