Tip: How to Brew In A Bag (BIAB)

My first batch of All Grain was a disaster. It took over 6 hours to brew and the beer was barely drinkable. So I went looking for something simpler. I was thinking, "What if you scaled up the steeping grain process to a full mash?" Well, the Aussies thought of that long before I did. They named it Brew In A Bag (BIAB).

Equipment:

You probably have most of what you need, already. This is the additional equipment you may need:

• A 10 gallon (40 Qt.) brew pot with a lid. Aluminum is fine.
• A propane burner. The kind used for frying turkey's.
• A BIAB bag. This is the only hard to obtain item. It's just a pillow case style bag made from voil fabric. It needs to be 1 1/2 times the height of your brew pot and big enough so that the brew pot could completely fit inside the bag. My wife made mine. I'll try to do a project on making a BIAB bag, in the future.
• A metal colander, big enough to cover the bottom of the brewpot.

That's it. If you're doing extract brewing, you should have everything else you'll need. And remember, the Instruction Sheet Builder now has BIAB support.

Process:

IMPORTANT: Take proper safety precautions. Propane burners put out a lot of heat with a big flame. So keep all flamable materials a safe distance away. Keep a fire extinguisher on hand, just in case something goes wrong. And watch the little ones around your setup!

Start by setting up the propane burner and putting your brew pot on top, filled with about 7 1/4 gallons of pure drinking water. Then pose for a cheesy photo :-)

Notice I've placed the colander upside-down in the brew pot. This will keep the BIAB bag from burning, should we need to adjust the temperature, during the mash.

The milled grains will drop the temperature of the water by about 7 degrees, so raise the temperature 7 degrees higher than your desired mash temperature. For this batch I'm mashing at 152 degrees, so I started by bringing the water to 159 degrees and turning the propane burner off.

Then I put the BIAB bag in the brew pot.

I added my milled grains.

And stirred the mash to make sure there were no dry clumps.

Next I checked the temperature. You can add heat for a minute or two if it dropped too much. The colander will protect the BIAB bag.

I put the lid on the brew pot.

And wrapped it in a blanket to keep in the heat. Give the mash a stir and check the temperature every 30 minutes or so. If the temperature has dropped more than a couple of degrees, turn the propane burner on for a few minutes. Make sure any flamable materials are far away from the flame.

When the mash time has ended, place the BIAB bag in a large strainer for a few minutes to let the grains drain into the brew pot. At this point you can turn the propane burner back on to get the boil started.

I transfer the strainer and BIAB bag to the fermenting bucket to collect the last of the wort. When it slows to a drip, I pour what collected in the bucket back into the brew pot. The grains can be discarded, or added to a compost heap.

Wait for the wort to come to a nice, rolling boil.

Then you can add the bittering hops. I use a small, nylon bag for my hops. It keeps the amount of trub to a minimum.

It's best to clip the bag to the handle. If the bag goes into the brew pot completely, it can open, which would defeat the purpose. At this point you just follow your hop schedule as you would with an extract brew.

When the boil time has ended, turn off the propane burner and remove the hop bag(s). Let them drain back into the brew pot, the same as with the BIAB bag.

At this point I carefully move the brew pot to a large keg chilling tub. I surround it with frozen water bottles and cold water. If you live in a climate where your tap water is cold, a wort chiller will speed things up. In Arizona, our tap water is too warm most of the year, for a wort chiller to be effective.

Wait for the wort to reach about 70 degrees,

Finally, transfer the wort to the primary frementing bucket, pitch your yeast and snap on the lid. Insert the airlock with water (or vodka) and move it to your Temperature Controlled Fermentation Chamber.