ishredthecello

Recipes 

What did I do wrong here. I brewed in a bag, used the calculations on this site to get my volumes and temps. I ended up with 10 gallons of wort for my 6.6.


So I used the volumes from the site. Mashed for 60 minutes at the 152*. Sparged with the amount it said for 10 minutes. i pressed the grains down to get the wort. so i ended up with 10 gallons of wort?

i took a gravity reading of the 10 gallons i have and it's 1.048 at preboil. but problem is i have 10 gallons, not 6.6? was it the pressing down that i've seen people do with this process, but maybe because they weren't sparging?

i did something horribly wrong on this attempt

ishredthecello

Recipes 

opps heres the calculator i used...

fastfocus

Recipes 

look's like you have the per-boil wort from hell. Short time brewing. But, couldn't you evap it down? 1.5g per hour will take some time to do. I read on a thread some were about doing that with 15g down to 6g for a barley wine.

ishredthecello

Recipes 

i think where i went wrong is squeezing out the grains. i guess for that calculator it takes into account that you aren't squeezing out the grains.

what i decided to do was make a lower gravity beer as a 10 gallon-ish batch. not what i wanted, but should still be good

feinbera

Recipes 

...or, you could just toss the extra wort.

At 1.048 pre-boil, you could just boil 6.5 gal down to 5.5 gal somewhere around 1.056; ferment that down to a nice 1.012 or so, and you'll hit a respectable 5.9% ABV.

If I had to guess, I'd say your volumes are off because maybe you squeezed the bag a little too hard? Looks like you got almost all of your water out; I don't BIAB, but just doing straight, bagless all-grain, I plan on losing at least half a quart per pound to grain absorption. You don't wanna waste good wort, but especially if you're sparging, you don't need to wring the grain bag completely dry, either.

ishredthecello

Recipes 

i'm gonna see what happens...isnt' there a saying for it?

"Relax Don't Worry, Have a Home Brew"

tonyc318

Recipes 

I do brew in a bag and I use a simpler method for figuring out how much water. I go pounds of grain x .1 then add that to my desired preboil amount. BIAB absorption is less then standard mashing. I also don't squeeze it much. I usually target 7.5 preboil and end up with 6 after the boil. Then I transfer close to 5.5 to the fermenter. Works out pretty well.

ishredthecello

Recipes 

how do you sparge?

I finished with about 6 gallons of 1.068 og. It'll be interesting to see how this one turns out. I went to a 90minute boil and adjusted receipe. I had probably about 2gallons still in kettle that I unfortunately discarded.

tonyc318

Recipes 

I don't usually sparge. To me, that's one of the reasons for doing BIAB. I sparged once when I did a 10 gal batch in my keggle. Couldn't fit all of my grain and preboil water in there so drain the grains and sparged about a gal of water then added it back before the boil. Typically with about 10lbs of grain I will add close to 8 gal of water into my pot, then end up with around 7.5 gal preboil. I also use a hop spider so I don't get as much trub loss.

ishredthecello

Recipes 

I have an 11 gallon pot. this recipe had 18.5lbs of grain. would i be able to do the easy sparge method of mash, raise, let drip, heat water to 170, dip grains back in for 10 mins?

if i use the min of 1.25 qts p/lb, i'd need just about 5.75gallons there. plus what another 2gallons for loss? think i'd be able to fit about 8 gallons of water + the grains without it over flowing?

or could i do the 5.75gallons mash, pull grains out, add the other 2 gallons, get to 170, dip back in and sparge?

i tend to like to end with about 5.5gallons of final wort to ferment