All Grain on stove?

Brewing processes and methods. How to brew using extract, partial or all-grain. Tips and tricks.

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ggarber
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All Grain on stove?

Post by ggarber »

I've been thinking about making the leap to all-grain brewing for some time, but am worried about the amount of time it will take to boil a 5 gallon batch on my gas stove. I live in NYC, so it's already hard enough storing all the equipment in my tiny apartment, but getting a propane burner for an outdoor boil is simply not a viable option. I was wondering what kind of experience any of you have had with a full wort boil on an ordinary natural gas stove in terms of time and quality. Thanks for the help.
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slothrob
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Post by slothrob »

Boiling 6.5 gallons in 1 pot is probably more than your stove will handle.

When I did this, I split the batch into 2 pots on the stove and added half the hops to each at each time point. Well, I actually did more like 2/3 and 1/3 volume and hops because of the pots I had. It works fine.

If you know how much you boil off in your current pot, just double it to figure out how much you'll lose in 2 pots, so that you hit 5 or so gallons at the end.

Another option is to get a 1000+watt bucket heater and put that into 1 pot on the stove. I've never tried it, but some people do it.
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wottaguy
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RE: All Grain on stove?

Post by wottaguy »

This would be a difficult task to do on an apartment sized stove. I think what I would do would be to make up a concentrated version of the all grain wort to a volume size of 2.5 to 3 gallons, then boil and hop this and cool it down. In the primary you can put in the cold water needed to get the 5 gallons then pour your already boiled wort in with it.
If you really want to do a full boil and do the full 5 gallons on the kitchen stove, get a fire extinguisher (sp?) and please be very very careful!

Hope this helps!
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Post by slothrob »

You'll use a lot more grain if you try to do a concentrated small volume boil. If I had to do that, instead of a split boil, I would do a partial mash. Partial mash to something like a 3-4 gallon boil, with all the specialty grains and as much base grains as about 1/2-2/3 of the gravity will allow. Make up the difference with DME.

This would allow you to make most styles of beer and be virtually indistinguishable from an all-grain beer. This is essentially what I do on the rare occasions I want to make a high gravity beer and the grain won't all fit in my tun. It just won't be as cheap as all-grain.

The split boil approach works fine, though. The one problem I had was cooling all that wort. It takes forever in a cold water bath in the sink. So you'll still want to get a chiller of some sort, and make some changes to your sink faucet so you can connect a hose (or maybe you can connect directly to the line under the sink, are those the same size threads?). Just don't leave it running and unsupervised or your downstairs neighbors will hate you.
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Post by bzwrxbz »

I live in a small apartment as well.... I just split the batch into two pots. Since it is pretty cold outside, the wort will chill to pitching temperature in less than two hours typically.
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