How Much Grain to use ?

[jstrausss]

I 've been looking into the process of going or doing All - Grain Brews . Theres lots of listings on how the process works and what to do , but many do not tell you how much grain is used to how much water, to produce how much wort?? Is there a formula or general rule of thumb ?

[Jughead]

You might want to start with some of Palmer's how to brew:

http://www.howtobrew.com/section2/chapter12-3.html
and
http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/index.html

Basically you want to mash with about 1.25 qts of water per pound of grain (depending on the beer style). You need enough grain to supply all of the fermentables for your beer. Each grain will supply so many points per pound per gallon of wort. You will not get all of the points out of a pound of grain. Assume you will get 70% of the points. So if you want to make 5 gallons of a 1.045 OG beer, you need 5 *45 / .70 = 321 points. If your malt has a ppg value of 34, then you need 321/34 = 9.5 pounds. Then you can collect about 6 gallons of wort, and boil down to about 5 and see how close you come to your target. You will learn your systems efficiency after a few brews.

There's also lots of software or web pages around to calculate this for you.

[brewmonkey]

Check out "Designing Great Beer" by Ray Daniels.

[jstrausss]

Alot of great info. Thanks for the replys. I'm saving and printing all this stuff