Post Boil Dilution to SG

[KTY]

I have a 12 bbl BK and 30 bbl tanks. Generally I have been brewing 10 bbl 3X to fill a 30 bll tank. I have kicked around the idea of brewing my flagships to higher SG and diluting to the proper SG.

I'm thinking that for 2 back to back 12 bbl brews I would only need to bring 6 bbls of water to boil, chill and pump over to FV. I assume I would need to adjust my pH of the water to match the pH of the brew as well. The only problem I see with this approach is a potential colloidal breakdown and possible reduction in mouth feel. I realize hop utilization would be different but I think I can easily counterbalance that since none of these are hop forward beers.

Anyone have any thoughts on this process? Thanks.

[scmorgan]

We high grav brew often and notice no difference. The make up water we heat up and run thru the heat ex, never to boil, just enough to kill any bugs.

Beersmith has a diluition tool, it is always spot on. For some beers we brew over 2 but with the dilution get 3 batches out.

[kai]

Scotty,

Do you knock the dissolved oxygen out of that water? I've found that even liquor residing in the HLT for hours still carries a DO far too high for beer dilution purposes.

If we're talking ad-hoc approaches to de-aerated water additions / high grav brewing, best to bring up DO levels too!

[KTY]

Scotty,
P
Do you knock the dissolved oxygen out of that water? I've found that even liquor residing in the HLT for hours still carries a DO far too high for beer dilution purposes.

If we're talking ad-hoc approaches to de-aerated water additions / high grav brewing, best to bring up DO levels too!

just to be clear, I am talking about pre-fermentation. Basically brewing a higher gravity beer and diluting before yeast is pitched. I figure I will have some hop utilization concerns that I did not fully take into consideration. otherwise I'll know soon. Have 60 bbls fermenting right now. Fingers crossed.

[jemthebrewer]

High gravity boils

Doing high gravity boils works. You do lose some hop and mash efficiency, but it does save some time/labor. Like if you are able to knock out in 2 brews what you used to do in 3, that is a good thing. Also, doing high gravity boils make is much less likely that you will oversparge. We've added the make-up water in a few different ways...knocking the water out at the end is the least efficient. Adding water to the high gravity wort in the whirlpool tank worked well (20 barrel brewhouse with a WP tank that floods at 30 barrels). What we do now is use a Coriolis meter to measure the Plato reading of the wort and a proportioning valve to automatically dose sterile filtered water post HX. This way we aren't heating a bunch of water up just to cool it down and it shortens our knockout times. It has been a good stopgap tool to increase production (we now can brew 760 bbl in a 5 day week on a 20 barrel brewhouse).