Moving to Mini Mash

[pretzel]

I am planning on trying a mini mash and full boil this weekend. I would like to do it with a recipe i used last time, but need help converting it. Any suggestions out there:
1lb flaked soft white wheat
4 lbs light dme
1.5 lbs coopers wheat lme
.25 oz simcoe
.22 oz magnum
.22oz magnum
white labs wlp320

Also since this is my first time doing a full boil do I only put 5 gal of water in and boil, or do I have to use more water so that the final volumer is 5 gal.
Thanks

[J.Brew]

Your going to want to boil a larger volume and boil down to your target volume. Since your target is a 15% boil off rate start with 5 + 15% for an hour boil. As far as your mini mash conversion, it doesn't look like your using any specialty grains so I'd probably mash the flaked wheat with about about 6 lbs. of domestic two row base malt in place of the light DME. It's tough to say for sure until you know the extract efficieny of your mini mash setup, but when I styarted I just would just substitute 1.5 lbs. base malt for every 1 lb. of malt extract. If you don't have the space for that size mini mash adjust it. Hope this helps a bit.

[Brew Engineer]

J Brew beat me to it.
um, I just said J Brew Beat me...

Anyway-

Ideally, you'd like to end your boil with about 5.5 gallons, that way, when you're cooled and transfer to your fermentor, you leave some wert behind with the trub, hop matter, etc. Your boil off rates may vary a little, but you'll want to start with about 7 gallons (that's volume after you've added any DME/LME). You'll also need to up your grain bill slightly to adjust for the final volume being larger than 5 gallons.

I would highly recommend you download promash from promash.com. The trial version will let you calculate boil volumes based on boil off rates, and you can play with adjusting your grain bill.

As far as converting to minimash, it depends on what your'e hoping to get out of the beer style. To start with, I'd replace some percentage of your DME with 2 row. I would start with 7 lbs of two row (to end up at 5.5 gallons), but have light DME on hand. Depending on your efficiency, you'll probably need to add a little DME (~1 lb) to get to your proper starting gravity.

Promash is great at letting you play with amounts and efficiencies to get the proper gravity readings.

Good luck, let us know how it goes!

[pretzel]

Great info, thanks. I was planning on boiling for 90 minutes. Would that 15% still be ok? Also thought I needed to boil for 30 min, then add bittering for 60 minutes for a total of 90.
I planned on mash temp of 150, drain into kettle, then pour water at 165 through the mash to get the left over sugars off. Does this sound correct.
Last question, how much water should I mash with, and how much should I sparg with?
Thanks

[linuxelf]

How much grain can your minimash tun handle? I'm doing minimashes now as well, but I can only mash about 4lbs of grain in mine. (I've got a 2 gallon minimas tun) The ratio I'm using is about 1.25 quarts per lb of grain for the mash, and for the sparge, I just fill the tun back up to about the same level as the mash was. It's going to be less water for the sparge because the grains will have absorbed some of the mash water.

One more thing to keep in mind, if your recipe was written for partial boil, when you go to a full boil you are going to get better hop utilization, so your final product may be considerably hoppier than it would have been had you done partial. Promash can help you figure that out, too.

[Brewby]

http://home.elp.rr.com/brewbeer/extract/pres.pdf

Check out the link above. It is a paper by Ken Schwartz about doing partial mashes and how to convert extract or all grain recipes to partial mash.

This is what I used when I first started doing partial mashes. It has lots of great info.

Also if you get the chance check out the chapter in Ray Daniels book 'Designing Great Beers' that deals with hitting your target gravity by adding a little DME to your wort after the partial mash.

As far as mash water volumes check out Denny's page (if you are batch sparging)
http://hbd.org/cascade/dennybrew/

I usually used 1.33qt of water per lb of grain to mash.

[J.Brew]

Nice Brewby....excellent source. And Pretzel, it's a 15% boil off target rate per hour.

[pretzel]

Here is what I ended up with, hope it works
1lb flaked wheat
2.5 lbs 2 row
2.5 lbs red german wheat
2.5 lbs Pilsen DME
.5 lbs Rice Hulls
.25 oz simcoe
.5 oz centenial
wlp 320


Any thoughts?