Do I have enough patience for this?

I attempted my first partial mash-an english brown ale. Of course, I have questions...

I followed deathbrewers instructions (easy to follow--thx to deathbrewer). One of my questions has to do with batch size. I start with 2g of strike, two 2g of sparge. After I complete the partial mash, add extract, and complete 60m boil, I ended up with ~2.5g. I then topped it off with another 2.5g. Does a typical recipe account for this loss? Could I taken readings that would influence changing "topping off."? Maybe a 4g batch would have better taste than 5g?



Although I screwed up by not taking premash gravity readings, I ended up with 5g at 1.053. Today, 10 days later, I moved it to the secondary at 1.02... Should I have waited? I'm thinking the primary was still fermenting, but it had slowed down a lot.

Any thoughts on my process? Thanks--any criticism/insight is greatly appreciated.

Here's are the ingredients:
Grains used:
1lb Pale Chocolate (crushed)
1lb Caramel (crushed)
4lb Rahr 2-row (crushed)

Tried to maintain between 150-155 degrees for 1 hour. Conversion after 30m.


At 57 added 4.6aau, 1oz, Fuggle
At 20m added 1/3cup brown sugar
At 15m added 5.4 1oz Kent
At 15m added 1tsp irish moss

At 0m removed from boil—chilled

Pitched whitelabs british ale yeast WLP005

1.020 is a bit high still, but no worries it will finish off in secondary... just dont bottle it until you're sure its done!

Yeah, you were a bit high at 1.020, but that's totally reasonable - you should probably expect the yeast to waken a bit in secondary and create a new krausen, so watch carefully for the next day or so to make sure you don't need a blowoff tube. What's your expected FG?

I assume you added extract although i don't see it listed.

When it comes to boiling off, you're just concentrating the wort. What you need to think about is wort soaked up by the grains or lost to trub. If you lose a lot there, then you replace the volume with top off water, your beer will be thinner. So the recipe should take that into consideration. The fact that you had an OG of 1.053 suggests that things were okay for you.

+1 on the 1.053 being good. Though if you wanted to make it a higher SG, you could measure the gravity after cooling the wort and then calculate how much water you need to add to get your desired starting gravity. BeerSmith can do this for you, orr you can do it by hand:

FG = (% wort of final volume x Wort Gravity) + (% water of final volume x water gravity)

You may have to make some assumptions initially on the math to find the right final volume. So say you start with your 2.5 gal of wort, which I calculated out to be 1.106 based on your previous info and that formula. Now say you want to make a 4 gallon batch, you know that your wort is still 2.5 gal, so that's 62.5% of the total final volume. So the water will be the other 37.5%, and should be 1.000 gravity. (These numbers should all be adjusted for 60F)

FG = (.625 x 1.106) + (.375 x 1.000)
FG = 0.691 + .375
FG = 1.066

Hope this isn't too confusing, let me know if you have questions.