The Brew Bag Blog — making beer
Brew In A Bag Video Series by The Brew Bag founder Rex Slagel
BIAB brew in a bag fabric for a brew bag grain crush hop spider how to brew Insulation lost temperature brew in a bag making a brew bag making beer mash no sparge sparge sparging stuck sparge The Brew Bag voile water to grain ratio wort filter
We've seen a good many videos showing how to use a fabric filter to brew in a bag, but there aren't any that detail why this works so well. Here you'll find a bit of science along with some practical information to make great beer in about 3.5 hours using minimal equipment.
All Grain Brewing - Three Tier VS Brew In A Bag
BIAB BIAB making brew in a bag brew in a bag sparge efficiency of beer fly sparging home brewing making beer mash gravity no sparge
In a recent article discussing different methods of brewing, the author differentiated "all-grain" from Brew In A Bag. I had to read the sentence twice. BIAB does not use extract, does not come in a kit, (although Brewer's Best is now offering six BIAB kits that include the hops, grain, priming sugar, yeast, and caps) and utilizes the same mashing schedule as the "all grain" method. Now here's the kicker - to make beer using a brew bag you start with grain, that's right, BIAB uses nuttin but grain! I'll tell you what's happening across the USA - new and...
Hop Spider VS The Brew Bag
BIAB BIAB making brew in a bag efficiency of beer hop spider hop utilization how to brew making beer voile wort
The utilization is influenced by the vigor of the boil, the total gravity of the boil, the time of the boil and several other minor factors. The vigor of the boil can be considered a constant for each individual brewer, but between brewers there probably is some variation. The gravity of the boil is significant because the higher the malt sugar content of a wort, the less room there is for isomerized alpha acids. The strongest bittering factors are the total amount of alpha acids you added to the wort, and the amount of time in the boil for isomerization. Understandably then, most equations for IBUs work with these three variables (gravity, amount, and time) against a nominal utilization. As mentioned earlier, the utilization for alpha acids in homebrewing is generally accepted as topping out at about 30%.
http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter5-4.html
To sparge or not to sparge - it is the question.
brew in a bag sparge how to brew making beer mash gravity no sparge sparging thin mash wort
Many of the sparge brewers I talk to about BIAB scratch their heads when they hear that the brew in a bag method is a no sparge method. Nearly all of them say "but what about all the sugars that get left behind in the grain, aren't you losing valuable fermetables?" At issue is not whether no sparge "loses" fermentable sugar, but how much is actually in the boil kettle. While it is true that the grain bag after lifting from the mash tun has sugars remaining, at what point is sparging a zero return effort? The concept of brew...
