Batch Sizes

[Doragan]

A couple of questions on the sizes of a brew:

1. What is the smallest batch you can do with a boiler and mash tun which is designed to do 25L?

2. Is there anything which you need to bear in mind if you are brewing from a recipe which has a different batch size (except from using more grain obviously!). Do you need to leave it to sparge for longer for instance?

 

[graysalchemy]

You will need to adjust the hops as well and I can't see any problem doing a smaller batch apart from you will obviously have to keep the elements covered. You may experience a greater % loss to evaporation due to the Surface area/volume ratio will increase with a smaller volume.

With regards to the sparge I always fly sparge at 1 litre/minute. Use the forum calculators to calculate your sparge volumes.

:thumb:

 

[Pinck]

I agree with Secret Brewer's tips.

I'll also add that with the mass of your mash (mash mass sounds funny) being small, you'll need to pay close attention to maintaining temperature. If you're using a bucket/cooler mashtun as opposed to something that's directly fired (or fancy indirect fired stuff), then you'll definitely want to preheat your tun with hot water prior to adding your grain and mash water.

That said, I'm a big advocate for using a brew-in-a-bag approach to doing small batches. This no-sparge approach has debatable limitations for efficiency on bigger batches, but in smaller batches a drop in efficiency is a pinch more grain.

 

[graysalchemy]

That is sound advice Pinck :thumb: Boil in the bag is much under estimated for smaller batches or those of us with out a full AG set up.