Homebrew equipment and recipe kits are most commonly designed for batch sizes of 5 gallons, it’s become an industry standard that’s accepted by most as the norm. While it’s possible the first kit manufacturers settled on the 5 gallon mark because it struck the perfect balance between too little and too much, it’s also possible the volume was more a function of two less romantic things– plastic and profits. Standard 6 gallon paint buckets are cheap, easy to use, and remarkably effective fermentation vessels, and including them in kits allows for shop owners to sell ingredients for 5 gallon batches, which ultimately turns a larger profit than smaller volume brewing. This stuff matters, particularly back when our fledgling hobby was striving to make a name for itself.

And make a name for itself, it most certainly has! By some accounts, there are over 1.2 million people who homebrew today, the majority presumably cutting their teeth with 5 gallon starter kits. Often, those who find themselves tromping down the obsessive path of homebrewing end up stepping outside this size standard for various reasons, brewing up smaller and/or larger batches for the purposes of experimentation, economics, and enjoyment.

For this Brü’s Views, we welcome a guest who has undoubtedly inspired many homebrewers to step outside of their brewing comfort zones to try new and exciting things. As the voice behind the Basic Brewing Radio podcast, James Spencer has been an integral part of the homebrewing community for over a decade, and he’s made a name for himself as an advocate of small batch brewing. A huge thanks to James for sharing his thoughts on less traditional batch sizes!

On Less Traditional Batch Sizes

| JAMES SPENCER |

My obsession with small batches began when I was making an extract starter in late 2005. As I watched the small volume of wort boil in the pan, I thought to myself that I was essentially brewing a tiny batch of beer. I would just need to add hops to make it complete. That fascination grew into an experiment for the first episode of what became Basic Brewing Video. I brewed two half-gallons of beer, adding extract in one for the full length of the boil and only in the last fifteen minutes in the second. The beers came out differently, but each was very tasty.

Early the next year, I decided to brew a six-pack of IPA. Using a one-gallon jug as the fermenter for an extract recipe, Steve Wilkes and I discovered the resulting beer to be just as tasty as bigger volume recipes. More experiments followed: splitting a five-gallon batch of mead into one-gallon jugs and flavoring with ancho chilis, apricots, blood oranges, black cherries, allspice, and saffron; a robust extract porter; and an all grain IPA.

With each of these batches, we found that we could be a bit adventurous with recipe formulation and experimentation with unusual ingredients. Brewing with less volume means there is less risk. If you screw up a gallon’s worth of ingredients, you’re not out that much money. This led to experimental brews such as my Fruitcake Barleywine that featured brown sugar, molasses, tons of spice, and candied fruit. If it turned out weird and nasty, it would be no big deal. If it were awesome, I could scale up into a “full sized” batch. It turned out to be delicious, but I still stick to small volume brews. A little goes a long way.

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from brewers who see the value of playing with smaller batches, but I have also received some negative comments, too. Some say things like, “I don’t get out of bed for anything less than a ten-gallon batch.” Sure, even though small batches don’t take as much time to brew as larger batches, brewing big is more efficient, time-wise. However, there are several advantages to thinking small:

Experimental “pilot” batches of test recipes

Less financial risk of failure

Lower cost of entry in brewing equipment

Smaller footprint, allowing small-space brewers to brew more easily

Lighter weights of kettles and fermenters for those who can’t lift heavy things

More variety in the kinds of homebrew we produce

Less time needed for brewing and packaging

Nowadays, my average batch is two gallons. My fermenter is a three-gallon plastic spring water jug that I got at the hardware store. I can play around with recipe formulation, and by the time I’m ready to move on to drinking something different, the homebrew is gone.

I’ll give one more example before I get off my soapbox. When my son was in high school, one of his friends expressed an interest in the science of brewing and wanted to sit in on a brew day. I invited him, his little brother, and his dad over to brew a one-gallon batch of pale ale. It was an all grain batch, and I used Marshall’s quick and dirty technique of only mashing for half an hour and boiling for the same amount of time. We chatted around in the kitchen while we brewed, and before we knew it, the wort was chilled and pitched. A few weeks later, we had the family back over to sit on the patio, and the dad and I sampled the results. It was a delicious, hoppy, clear pale ale. The same process full-sized would have taken much longer and would have been quite a lot more work to brew. Scaling it down allowed us to demonstrate the science while staying inside the short teenage attention span.

To wrap up, I’m not lobbying for anyone to scrap his or her brew sculpture or conical fermenter. However, brewing small can be a versatile tool in your brewing tool belt as you craft the next generation of excellent brews.

| MARSHALL |

I found myself pondering the extent to which batch size matters years ago as I was in the process of building out my garage brewery. I’d only ever made 5 gallon batches at that point, and while I was pretty sure my friends and I could plow through more beer, I was concerned higher volume batches might complicate my brewing process, potentially to the point of making it less enjoyable. Ultimately, I resolved to buying equipment that would allow for larger volumes but work equally as well for the 5 gallon batches I was accustomed to, just in case 10 gallon brew days sucked. With my 70 quart cooler MLT and 14 gallon kettle acquired, I made my first 10 gallon batch of beer back in September of 2011, after which I realized any concerns I had were erroneous. It was exactly like the many 5 gallon batches I’d made previously, save for the few extra minutes it took to heat my strike water, bring the wort to a boil, and chill the greater volume of liquid. By making a larger starter from a single pack of yeast, I was essentially able to make double the amount of beer for a marginal investment bump. Awesome!

Two kegs of Tiny Bottom Pale Ale next to 2 kegs of m(O)ktoberfest followed by 2 kegs of Helles next to 2 kegs of…

Dammit, when’s that Tiny Bottom gonna kick?!?!

This experience is what ultimately inspired a change in my brewing behavior. It’s not necessarily that the beers weren’t good, there was just so much of the same thing. From the 6 taps I had on my keezer flowed only 3 styles. What I was missing was variety. Rather than reverting back to brewing smaller batches more often, I began splitting 10 gallon batches, either prior to or after the boil, and doing something different to half such as steeping specialty grains, boiling with different hop schedules, and fermenting with different yeasts. It was through this that the exBEERiment series was born.

These days, I rarely make batches smaller than 5 gallons, save for the occasional Short & Shoddy brew, mostly because I end up giving the large portion of what I make away during the data collection process and prefer to have some leftover to enjoy myself. But in my opinion, small batch brewing is tremendously valuable, not only for those curious about the impact of different ingredients and process variables, but for brewers looking to either make the switch from extract brewing or new folks interested in jumping directly into all-grain brewing! The fact a 2 gallon batch of delicious all-grain beer can be made in roughly the same time it takes to throw together an extract batch using “gear” many have on hand makes it a very appealing and affordable option.

| GREG |

I’m a big advocate of brewing non-standard batch sizes. In fact, I don’t think I’ve fermented in a standard 6 gallon carboy in well over a year. If you’ve been following the xBmts, you may have noticed I’m the lone weirdo who forgoes carboys altogether in favor of my fermentor of choice, corny kegs, which generally necessitate non-standard batch sizes considering headspace needs.

I believe corny kegs are superior to carboys in pretty much every way imaginable. They are made of durable, easy-to-clean stainless steel and come with a built in diptube for sampling. Their tall and slim profile means I can fit a good deal more of them in my fermentation freezer, which means more beer for me. They come in a variety of sizes including 2.5 gallon, 3 gallon, 5 gallon, and 10 gallon. They even allow for pressurized fermentation like the pros as well as using the pressure to facilitate easy oxygen free keg-to-keg transfers. Sure, they may cost a little more, but since kegs can be found used for reasonably cheap and they last a lifetime, I view the added investment is more than worth it. Lastly, if you happen to drop one, you’re not going to end up in the hospital with a leg perforated with shards of glass.

My love of non-standard batch sizes is certainly not limited to corny kegs, as I’ve fermented in all kinds of vessels including buckets, 2 liter soda bottles, and 1 gallon glass apple juice jugs. When I really want to experiment with an obscene number of small batches, my preferred fermentor is definitely the half gallon mason jar. I know what you’re thinking– how much beer can you even make in a mason jar? The answer is about 3 bottles worth. It’s not much, but when I just want to make a bunch of beers while manipulating a single variable for experimental purposes, 3 bottles per fermentation is plenty. For example, I once compared 7 mini batches with different hop steep temperatures.

Sometimes brewing non-traditional batch sizes requires a bit of ingenuity and tinkering, like the time I bent copper tubing to make the world’s most adorably small immersion chiller used for my mason jar setup. And then, of course, the finished beer needed to be bottled, so I jury-rigged a crazy oxygen free bottling system using CO2 pressure to push the beer through my beer gun. It may seem nutty, but the system works! My over-engineered mason jar brewery makes it easy for me to experiment with variables that would otherwise be impractical to test with full-size batches.

I’m not advocating that others ditch their carboys and start fermenting solely in mason jars. I just want to point out that there are plenty of non-standard food grade containers available that could easily be repurposed for fermentation. For those who feel like experimenting and don’t want to risk an entire 6 gallons of beer, give small batch fermenting a try. Get creative and think outside the carboy!

| RAY |

I’m often envious of other brewers who have a big variety of beers available at home, and who frankly have the time to dedicate to many different styles and experimental batches. Splitting a single 5 gallon batch of wort into multiple 1 gallon fermentors with varying yeasts, dry hops, etc. seems really interesting to me, but alas, I have neither the time nor the patience to do it myself.

These days, I find myself in a sort of strange land of brewing due to my involvement with Brülosophy. I’ve made the mistake in the past of letting friends and family get to my beer supply before I’ve gotten enough xBmt tasters, so now I generally mark xBmt beers as “DO NOT DRINK” on the keezer up until I’ve reached a set minimum, after which they go up-for-grabs. But this leaves me with a problem– no beer for myself, friends, and family for stretches of time. Hence, I recently changed the typical batch size I brew, opting to make two 10 gallon batches, so 20 gallons at a time, which allows me use 10 gallons for data collection and an extra 10 gallons for home “supply” including a keg I keep filled at my brother-in-law’s plcae. Even this feels extreme to me, completely monopolizing my fermentation space and further bottle-necking my production. But I don’t feel I have a lot of choice right now. While I could trim a little time out of my brew day by scaling back the batch sizes, the time-scarcity I’m faced with makes this is the best option for me– the output volume is sufficiently large to justify the time expenditure, and while I have a lot of curiosity about small batch experimentation, I just can’t get motivated enough to sacrifice the notable time required to package each of those versions. No, it’s far easier for me to brew my 20-gallon batches, keg it all at the same time, and be done with it.

One thing I hate about these larger batch brew days is how gun-shy it makes me when it comes to trying something weird. I don’t want to do anything that could potentially ruin the 10-20 gallons, so to some degree, I end up stuck in ruts in regards to the recipes I make, repeating just a handful of styles with only minor iterations. On one hand, I think this is good practice in that it helps me to really hone a recipe. However, on the other hand, I envy the small batch brewer that more frequently steps outside their comfort zone to make something that might be great, while accepting the arguably “smaller” risk that it may very well be awful.

| JAKE |

The size of batches people choose to brew has fascinated me since I started homebrewing. An old coworker of mine who brewed 50 gallon batches of his Mexican lager recipe only a few times per year contrasted with a friend who brewed 2 gallon partial mash batches every week or two. Both swore by their methods and cited various valid reasons for doing so.

I’ve had experience brewing anywhere from 2.5 gallon to 15 gallon batches and found, at least with the all-grain method I use, the time I dedicate to a batch doesn’t really change much based on size. With that being the case, I’ve kind of settled on brewing 10 gallon batches, as for me it strikes a decent balance between time investment and the amount of beer produced, allowing me to both enjoy beers I love while giving plenty away to friends for various reason. It’s also not so much that I feel bad dumping beer I’m not super pumped about or want to move on from and forget.

Ultimately, the batch size one chooses to stick with will be influenced by various things, and for me that was my desire to try new styles while also having old standbys avialble. Ten gallons does that for me. I love the idea of smaller batches, and as homebrewers with little investment in a batch, or customers to appease, I feel like it’s something amazing we can do. I’ll probably revisit small batch brewing in the future, but for now I’ll stick with 10 gallons and dream about my future ingredient exploration.

| MALCOLM |

I brew batch sizes that work for me, and since I share most of the beer I brew, smaller batches just don’t make sense for my applications. When I brew, it’s typically for a competition, special occasion like a wedding, or for an xBmt, and I often try to work it out such that a single brew day meets multiple demands while leaving me with some to drink for personal enjoyment.

Even when I’m not brewing with a particular purpose, I’ll usually stick with 11 gallon batches since it takes about the same amount of time and effort as a standard 5 gallon batch, plus I have the option of splitting the wort to make different beers. For example, I recently brewed an 11 gallon batch of Belgian Blond for competition, but I didn’t need to submit 10 full gallons, so I decided to do something else with the other half of the wort. As it turns out, I had a Sour Golden Ale ready to keg, which left me with a “bugged-up” carboy waiting to receive the fresh wort. Perfect! To add some character, I performed a simple mini-mash of wheat, oats, and Pilsner malt then added the resultant wort to the sour batch. Two beers, one brew day.

That’s what we think about less traditional non-batch sizes, what about you? If you’ve stepped outside of the 5 gallon zone, please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section below!

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