Justintoxicated
Well-Known Member
The first thing I had a problem with was calculating how much water to use in my beverage cooler mashtun.
Palmer suggests 2qts/lbs of grain, then sparge with 1.5 x that amount.
I used 12 lbs of grain, so that would be 6 gallons for mash and 9 gallons for sparging.
Seems to me there is no way I was going to get that much water loss!
LHB shop suggested 2.5qts of water per lbs of grain.
Instead I went with beersmiths calculations, but I'm not even sure I selected the right information.
I picked single infusion medium body. and I choose a water / grain ratio of 1.5 instead of the default 1.3q/gal. This came out to 8.8 (I used 9) gallons total, 6 for the mash and 3 for the sparge is what I went with due to estimating the amount of water using 5 gallon carboys (I need a better way to estimate gallons).
Doing it this way I ended up with 5.5 gallons after boil, and more cold break than any other beer I have ever brewed.
So why are Palmers numbers so far off?
Another thing I noted was the huge amount of hops that were left in my pan, I have never had that many hops left in my brew-pot before so not sure if that is a good or bad thing. The Hop schedule was 15, 10, 5 and 1 min, so maybe that's why? Should I have somehow shoved the leftover hops into the carboy? I would imagine the flavor and bittering would already be extracted from most of them, well except maybe the 1 min hop addition?
I also screwed up my mash a little, the water I poured in did not cool as much as calculated and ended up being about 165, so I immediately drained some and put in some cold water. I used the portion I drained for my sparge. Hopefully this didn't screw it up too badly.
My target gravity was 1.065 according to the recipe, I only came in at 1.052. Using Beer Smith the estimated original, pre-boil gravity at 1.051. Not sure what I did wrong though.
The other thing I did wrong was not make a starter. I was planning to use a different yeast but decided against it. I did get my vial of WLP007 directly from white labs on the way home from work though. It was manufactured 2 days ago.
Palmer suggests 2qts/lbs of grain, then sparge with 1.5 x that amount.
I used 12 lbs of grain, so that would be 6 gallons for mash and 9 gallons for sparging.
Seems to me there is no way I was going to get that much water loss!
LHB shop suggested 2.5qts of water per lbs of grain.
Instead I went with beersmiths calculations, but I'm not even sure I selected the right information.
I picked single infusion medium body. and I choose a water / grain ratio of 1.5 instead of the default 1.3q/gal. This came out to 8.8 (I used 9) gallons total, 6 for the mash and 3 for the sparge is what I went with due to estimating the amount of water using 5 gallon carboys (I need a better way to estimate gallons).
Doing it this way I ended up with 5.5 gallons after boil, and more cold break than any other beer I have ever brewed.
So why are Palmers numbers so far off?
Another thing I noted was the huge amount of hops that were left in my pan, I have never had that many hops left in my brew-pot before so not sure if that is a good or bad thing. The Hop schedule was 15, 10, 5 and 1 min, so maybe that's why? Should I have somehow shoved the leftover hops into the carboy? I would imagine the flavor and bittering would already be extracted from most of them, well except maybe the 1 min hop addition?
I also screwed up my mash a little, the water I poured in did not cool as much as calculated and ended up being about 165, so I immediately drained some and put in some cold water. I used the portion I drained for my sparge. Hopefully this didn't screw it up too badly.
My target gravity was 1.065 according to the recipe, I only came in at 1.052. Using Beer Smith the estimated original, pre-boil gravity at 1.051. Not sure what I did wrong though.
The other thing I did wrong was not make a starter. I was planning to use a different yeast but decided against it. I did get my vial of WLP007 directly from white labs on the way home from work though. It was manufactured 2 days ago.
