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rambler

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So i have a barley wine in the mash tun now and i just started sparging. I mashed it for 90 min at 153 and hit it with strike water at about 180. My problem is that with a 23# plus grain bill, I'm only getting gravity reading of 1.060, and thats after the temp. correction. Everything seems to flowing fine.


Any ideas?
 
what was your water to grain ratio for the mash? i would have bumped it up a little to get my volume for the running and wouldnt have sparged for a barley wine.
 
Batch size?

Can you do another sparge to get more out of the grain? It will increase your boil amount/time, but you should get to a higher OG...

For reference, I have a 5 gallon barley wine recipe, with almost 22.5# of grain for the grist. The estimated pre-boil gravity is 1.087... I'd need to get 52% efficiency in order to get only 1.060 for the pre-boil gravity...

What size is your mash tun? How much water did you mash with and sparge with?
 
rambler said:
So i have a barley wine in the mash tun now and i just started sparging. I mashed it for 90 min at 153 and hit it with strike water at about 180. My problem is that with a 23# plus grain bill, I'm only getting gravity reading of 1.060, and thats after the temp. correction. Everything seems to flowing fine.


Any ideas?
Click to expand...

I see that I'm about an hour after your question, so I'm not sure it will help you now- but next time, don't do a temperature corrected gravity reading! Over 100 degrees, the hydrometer is so inaccurate it's useless even with correction tables. Cool the sample to under 90 degrees, THEN take the reading and you can use temperature correction then.

I'm thinking that the gravity is much higher than you think it is! And boiling of course will decrease the volume and give you a higher gravity than you have now.
 
I just assumed that he either used a refractometer for the readings, or cooled the wort before taking them... Good catch though, since we don't actually know what the OP did yet...

If the OP doesn't have a refractometer, I think it's time to get one. :D
 
Thanks for all the answers y'all, I think I may have used a little bit of all that advice to fix it. I did have too thin of a mash hapnin, and thankfully had a surplus of sparge water so I rinsed the grains for all that they were worth. it was a five gallon recipe to start and now its about 12 gallons to boil. I may be there a while.

These numbers were lookin a bit scary. I dont think I've ever only hit 35% eff. before.
 
Man, yall must type way faster than me. Both temp readings i took were at 75 degrees so i had that covered.
 
Either that or we just have better internet connections than you do... Although, I think faster typing also comes into play... :D

As for the low efficiency number... I bet you won't get that low a rating a second time...

Out of curiosity what are you mashing in?
 
A keg. I can usually hit 75 without really trying and i think my best is about 85. i still am not sure why it was so low. To have a reading of 1.060 before even rinsing the grain doesnt make any sense.
 
Yes what are you mashing in? I got a 1.050 on my 1st ag with only 11# of grain. something has 2 be off.
 
Do you crush your own grain? If not, do you use the same source all the time? You could have gotten some stale grain, if it was crushed for you and you ordered it online. Depending on the supplier, who knows when it was actually milled. If you do crush your own, maybe check the mill gap to make sure it didn't move on you...

If it was me, I'd be checking every possible item for the grain, to at least rule it out...

I hope to have my refractometer before the end of this week (in time for a Thursday brew-day)... It will be very nice to see what the gravity is of my mash and sparge worts. I might even do a second sparge to use for starters.
 
What's your preboil SG and volume?

Oversparging (adding more water) can actually decrease your efficiency by "watering down" your runnings.

I'm thing about how you're getting 1.060 out of the mash- how much volume did you get out?
 
I think it has to be a combination of the mash being too thin and the grain not being milled right. I have had some questions about the mill that i used. It is at the HBS that i get my bulk material. It has seemed to be hit and miss because the rollers arent adjustable.

The water issue is probably all me. I used about 8.5 gallons of mash water b/c I like to keep it fairly thin. my false bottom doesnt flo really well and likes to stick. I'm also not impressed with the 1.5 gal. of deadspace in the bottom of my keg, it makes the mash water calculations tougher than they should be


I love Homebrewing!!!
 
There you go with that fast typing thing again. The gravity readings were my first tip that something was wrong. I took one of the very first runnings and came up with 1.060 with only 1 gallon in the kettle. It should have been at least 1.180. I let it go for a while longer and with about 3 gallons in the kettle I hit 1.060 again...weird. And when i took my last reading and decided to bail out with about 4 gallons in the ketlle it was about 1.055
 
for me it would of been 9 gallons mash with about 6.5 of runnings at 1080(estimated) and boiling down to 5.5 would be around 1100(estimated) wich would give a 9.5-10.5%abv .. im thinking it was your crush.. thats at about 50-60% efficency..
 
rambler said:
There you go with that fast typing thing again. The gravity readings were my first tip that something was wrong. I took one of the very first runnings and came up with 1.060 with only 1 gallon in the kettle. It should have been at least 1.180. I let it go for a while longer and with about 3 gallons in the kettle I hit 1.060 again...weird. And when i took my last reading and decided to bail out with about 4 gallons in the ketlle it was about 1.055
Click to expand...

You got four gallons out of a 8.5 gallon water addition? that doesn't seem to make any sense at all. You should have had about 6 gallons of first runnings.
 
No, I stopped sparging the grains at four gallons becuase my numbers were so low. I figured it would be better to put the brakes on and figure out what was going on.
 
rambler said:
not impressed with the 1.5 gal. of deadspace in the bottom of my keg
Click to expand...

Yooper said:
You got four gallons out of a 8.5 gallon water addition? that doesn't seem to make any sense at all. You should have had about 6 gallons of first runnings.
Click to expand...

this is the difference... that just sucks cause you would need to sparge with 2 gallons to hit your boil volume.. lower SG... but not as low as the OP got..
 
:confused::confused:
edmanster said:
for me it would of been 9 gallons mash with about 6.5 of runnings at 1080(estimated) and boiling down to 5.5 would be around 1100(estimated) wich would give a 9.5-10.5%abv .. im thinking it was your crush.. thats at about 50-60% efficency..[/QUOTE



So i wasnt as far off on my water amount as i thought. I was shooting for 1.118, and that is calculating at 75% efficiency. So i'm thinkin it was the crush also
Click to expand...
 
rambler said:
:confused::confused:
edmanster said:
for me it would of been 9 gallons mash with about 6.5 of runnings at 1080(estimated) and boiling down to 5.5 would be around 1100(estimated) wich would give a 9.5-10.5%abv .. im thinking it was your crush.. thats at about 50-60% efficency..[/QUOTE



So i wasnt as far off on my water amount as i thought. I was shooting for 1.118, and that is calculating at 75% efficiency. So i'm thinkin it was the crush also
Click to expand...

Since you stopped sparging at 4 gallons of runnings, how did you end up with 12 gallons? I'm not understanding something here.

You're fly sparging, I assume. Did you do a mash out?
Click to expand...
 
What type of thermometer are you using? Is it properly calibrated? I ask because not too long ago I did a batch and my thermometer was WAY off. I got about 50% efficiency when I normally get about 78%. So I went back and checked my thermometer and it was reading way higher than the actual temperature. Since then I got a thermapen and am darn glad for it.
 
rambler said:
:confused::confused:
edmanster said:
for me it would of been 9 gallons mash with about 6.5 of runnings at 1080(estimated) and boiling down to 5.5 would be around 1100(estimated) wich would give a 9.5-10.5%abv .. im thinking it was your crush.. thats at about 50-60% efficency..[/QUOTE



So i wasnt as far off on my water amount as i thought. I was shooting for 1.118, and that is calculating at 75% efficiency. So i'm thinkin it was the crush also
Click to expand...

i do a 1.5ltr to grain#.. thats the math i would of used if i were making a barley wine... the 2nd and 3rd runnings(parti-gyle) is just free beer after that... but i do a batch sparge..
Click to expand...
 
Sorry Yooper, Were definitely missing eachother here. When i say i stopped at four gallons , I mean that when i had four gallons of wort in the kettle and the reading was so low i decided to stop sparging. When i decide on a solution to the problem, what i decided to do was continue to rinse the grains with all of the sparge water i had heated up,for not only the sparge but also to clean out my wort chiller and fermenter.

So... after i had run all that extra water throught the grain i had a total of about 12 gallons. I rinsed it that much just to get all the sugar i could.

Now i am boiling it down to about 6 gallons just to get all that extra water out.


Clear?
 
rambler said:
Sorry Yooper, Were definitely missing eachother here. When i say i stopped at four gallons , I mean that when i had four gallons of wort in the kettle and the reading was so low i decided to stop sparging. When i decide on a solution to the problem, what i decided to do was continue to rinse the grains with all of the sparge water i had heated up,for not only the sparge but also to clean out my wort chiller and fermenter.

So... after i had run all that extra water throught the grain i had a total of about 12 gallons. I rinsed it that much just to get all the sugar i could.

Now i am boiling it down to about 6 gallons just to get all that extra water out.


Clear?
Click to expand...

i think what she's trying to understand is your sparging method.. if you mashed out or not?
 
edmanster said:
i think what she's trying to understand is your sparging method.. if you mashed out or not?
Click to expand...

That, and he said he batch sparged. But you CAN'T batch sparge if you still have two gallons of wort in the MLT!

You drain out all of the runnings- about six gallons. You only had 1.060, but that's not too bad if you have six gallons of it! If you then add water to get to 12 gallons, then you've diluted the 1.060 by half. That's what I'm trying to figure out.

If you're doing a partigyle, you wouldn't have sparged at all until after you drew off the 6 gallons. And when you don't sparge (as in a partigyle), your efficiency will suffer greatly. That's just part of the deal.

If you boiled the 6 gallons of 1.060 runnings down to 4.5 gallons, you would have had 1.090 OG.
 
I dont recal saying i batch sparge, because i dont, i actually fly sparge. But i dont see what difference that makes when it comes to me taking a reading with only one gallon of water in the kettle, pulled directly off the grain without the sparging being started, and coming up with a number that low

I have almost 24 pounds of grain in the MT, and to pull a 1.060 off of that, no matter which sparge method, or no sparge method for that matter, is pathetic
 
Yooper said:
That, and he said he batch sparged. But you CAN'T batch sparge if you still have two gallons of wort in the MLT!

You drain out all of the runnings- about six gallons. You only had 1.060, but that's not too bad if you have six gallons of it! If you then add water to get to 12 gallons, then you've diluted the 1.060 by half. That's what I'm trying to figure out.

If you're doing a partigyle, you wouldn't have sparged at all until after you drew off the 6 gallons. And when you don't sparge (as in a partigyle), your efficiency will suffer greatly. That's just part of the deal.

If you boiled the 6 gallons of 1.060 runnings down to 4.5 gallons, you would have had 1.090 OG.
Click to expand...

yoop.. sorry i brought up parti-gyle but i would of pland my barley wine batch with that in mind.. he's using 23# of grain wich he should of hit a 1080-1090 with 8.5 gallons of mash water with 4 gallons of of wort and a 1.5 gallon dead space.. its comming down to the crush or the conversion... im doing the batch sparging..
 
edmanster said:
yoop.. sorry i brought up parti-gyle but i would of pland my barley wine batch with that in mind.. he's using 23# of grain wich he should of hit a 1080-1090 with 8.5 gallons of mash wate rwith 4 gallons of of wort and a 1.5 gallon dead space.. its comming down to the crush or the conversion...
Click to expand...

Gotcha! I was confused by the other posts. Sorry about that!
 
rambler said:
Sorry Yooper, Were definitely missing eachother here. When i say i stopped at four gallons , I mean that when i had four gallons of wort in the kettle and the reading was so low i decided to stop sparging. When i decide on a solution to the problem, what i decided to do was continue to rinse the grains with all of the sparge water i had heated up,for not only the sparge but also to clean out my wort chiller and fermenter.

So... after i had run all that extra water throught the grain i had a total of about 12 gallons. I rinsed it that much just to get all the sugar i could.

Now i am boiling it down to about 6 gallons just to get all that extra water out.


Clear?
Click to expand...

Not really, but more so now that I see that there are several different conversations going, and your beer is NOT a partigyle and NOT a batch sparge!

Sorry for the confusion.
 
Well after all that Ive actually got to check out, we've got company ad im gettin "the eyes" thankyou both for tryin to figure it out with me. It has to come down the milling. Thats all there is to it.

And Ed, all of my measurments were taken with the refractometer and converted.
 
I would offer the following observations:

1. Brew day was made easier from the day I got my refractometer.

2. I would never put a hydrometer into wort that had not been cooled to pitching temperatures.

3. I take a conversion reading (to see whether the starches in the grain have been enzymatically changed to sugars) from my first runnings. I used to do an iodine test, but experience has shown me that if I take a refractometer reading of my first runnings, and they are in the expected ballpark of my OG, I've got full conversion.

4. My OG reading is always taken after the boil; I don't have to wait until after I chill, because it only takes a few seconds for three drops or so of wort to cool on the refractometer.
 
Just an update on the barleywine from hell. Five gallons are in the fermentor at a S.G of 25 brix (1.102) and fermenting happily. I am now looking into buying a grain mill because i dont trust that the crush I'm gettting from the HBS is reliable. I wil also punch a few more holes in the false bottom just to make sure it's flowing optimally.
 

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