Hey all. I just recently acquired a couple bourbon barrels and want to age a couple big beers until this winter. Aiming for an Old Ale in the neighborhood of 1.0 and an RIS or Baltic Porter around 1.1. We typically run a batch size of about 5-1/2 gallons in a 7 gallon fermenter. The issue is that the barrels appear to be 6-1/2 gallons. I'm brainstorming ways we could fill two barrels ASAP with the equipment we have: - 2 -10 gallon Kettles - 1 - 10 gallon mash tun - 4 - 7 gallon ale pails - 1 new 7 gallon conical Wondering if I will need to run two separate mashes and ferment two separate batches to combine to fill the barrel. But that sounds like a huge pain to do twice. That's 4 mashes and 4 fermenters. Does anyone else out there see something I don't and know of a good way to pull this off on our rig?
With a 10 gallon kettle 2 batches' 1 per barre Definatly 2 different beers so 2 mashes or extract batches.
Two barrels mean you need a total beer amount of 13 gallons (2 x 6.5). If you are constrained to obtaining 5.5 gallons of beer from your fermenters than you will indeed need to produce more than 2 batches to achieve your barrel values. An option is you could just produce a third batch using base malts to produce ‘add on’ beer to your barrels. For example: · Produce a 5.5 gallon batch of Old Ale · Produce a 5.5 gallon batch of style x · Produce a 2-3 gallon batch of base malt beer When transferring your beers to the barrels put the Old Ale in one barrel. Transfer the other beer style in the second barrel. Then top off the two barrels with the base malt beer. Does the above sound acceptable to you? Cheers!
NOt quite sure what the question is - are you looking to primary in the barrels? Then you'll want to leave sone headspace, probably targeting 5.5 gallons. I would more likely go for primary in your usual fermenters and secondary in the barrels. With a 10 gallon kettle you'll be able to do enough for a 6.5 gallon yield - you;ll want to have a blowoff hose intstead of an airlock on ther fermenters, but you should be OK. Just tweak a big recipe to allow for the increased yield.
Fermcap-S will also help with squeezing in extra beer to the 7 barrel fermenters and avoiding explosive fermentation. 5-10 drops should be enough to keep the krausen a bit at bay.
Looking to secondary in the barrels, just trying to figure out how to get a big enough batch with a 7 gallon fermenter and a 10 gallon kettle
This is the answer I was looking for! So in the end we decided on keeping it simpler. Even though I already have a batch of our RIS aging, we decided just to brew it again vs. creating an old ale. Then we decided on the second beer being a Cinnamon Vanilla Maple Porter. We brewed the porter last night, and I managed to yield 5-3/4 gallons out of the main boil. I took more runnings after we filled the boil kettle and put those in the house in a smaller kettle on the stove. The main batch hit our 1.090 that we were aiming for (brown sugar solution going into primary in a couple days should make it 1.098), I manage to boil the second runnings down to 1.054. Between the two, I got 6-1/4 gallons in. That should leave me racking around 6 into the barrel after i add my quart of brown sugar wort. If I do the same with the RIS, you are saying I could just brew up a gallon or two of Maris (my base for both) to 1.1 and top off both? Or should I throw a little crystal and chocolate in? the two overlapping ingredients?
Sure, add the crystal and chocolate in if they are common to the two batches. Best of luck here. Cheers!
Sure is, a chemical that reduces surface tension and prevents bubbles/foam from forming. Same stuff as in Gas-X. Also helps a lot with avoiding boil-overs if you add some drops while the worst is heating up post-mash.
