Compensating For Trub Loss

I'm trying to come to grips with some of life's most proponderous questions. So bear with me please.

As a beginning brewer I chose ingredient kits to familiarize myself with different beers and the general methods of extract brewing. The kits have all tasted great - containing great hop selections and good amounts of specialty grains.

It seems as if I made a good mistake with my first several batches. I started out with 5 gallons in my primary. Then once I transfered to the secondary, I had less because of the trub leftovers. Then to my bottling bucket it ran. Well, of course, by bottling time I had lost a good amount and wasn't bottling 5 gallons worth.

But the beer was fantastic. Then I learned the error of my ways and worked up a chocolate stout, and bottled 5 gallons by adding sanitized water along the way to make up for the trub losses. After three weeks of rest in the bottles I've been sampling them.

Tastes watered down to me...

Should I end up with a final bottling volume of 5 gallons (for 5 gallon recipes), or should I just not compensate for the trub and other losses?

Any thoughts?

Seems as tho most of the experienced brewers here shoot for 5.5 in the primary. That compensates for the various losses. I added 10% to the DME in my last batch (to compensate for the extra half gallan) and after topping off to 5.5 gals in the primary my OG was right where it was supposed to be.

yup. i make sure I have 6 gallons of water ready to go for brewing. the boil loses some, and then racking into the carboy loses some more, and I end up with something pretty close to 5.5 gallons in the primary and about 5 gallons bottled in the end.

I just began adjusting my water volume by using 6 G instead of 5 G when I start out. I notice my final gravities now are more on target and not crazy high. I wouldn't make it up for it once fermentation begins though.

Yeah- I also try to add a little more water in the begining to compensate for loss. On one of my batches, I ended up with almost 7 gallons! I don't know how or why this happened- but it was for a basic ale kit and luckily turned out pretty good- nice summer sipper.

I do a 3 gallon boil and almost 3 in the primary now.

I fill my carboys, with water, a measured '5 gallons',
then mark them with electrical tape, {but first}
{Dump the water out and dry the carboy off, real good.}
When brewing, I fill the 7.5 gallon primary,
{by eye} about a half gallon over the mark.
When I rerack to the secondary,
the wort fills the carboy to with in a few inches of the neck.
{Unless I drink it.}

The electrical tape lasts years if stuck on a dry carboy.
I don't go all the way around, but just a mark three or four inches long will do.
{Maybe several of them in case you do loose one.}
Then it is easy to keep them in place.


J. Knife



Don't worry,


Have a homebrew.

Just don't worry about the reduction in volume. I definitely wouldn't add water just to up the volume. You're better off with 45 bottles of good beer than 55 bottles of dirty water.

gibfried said:

I'm trying to come to grips with some of life's most proponderous questions. .....

Click to expand...

That just put a big grin on my face hearing that. When I first started brewing I had a hard time accepting that very fact. Somehow I felt cheated. As previously mentioned an easy fix is to adjust your recipe to start with a 5.5 initial volume. When I did finally get a final volume close to 5 gallons, it always left me with 48+ bottles. Then I had to rob some extra bottles out of another case, leaving me a partial case of bottles to deal with on the next batch. On the flip side, I wanted to cry the other day when a racked a brew into my secondary and not all of it would fit because my initial volume turned out to be a little too much (doh!).

Thanks for your input. I really don't have a problem with bottling a few less because of loss. What I'm interested in is good beer. That's why I started doing this anyway. I think I'd rather have my beer a bit more robust, and to be on the safe side either add a bit more fermentables or refrain from adding water.

Thanks again for your input. It's always good to hear wisdom from good beer drinkers.

gibfried said:

It's always good to hear wisdom from good beer drinkers.

Click to expand...

I think you mean "advice from drinkers of good beer".

My brother is a good beer drinker (as in, he's good at drinking beer), but you wouldn't want to follow any advice he might spew... especially if he's been good at drinking beer all day.

-walker

Right, right, right, right, right....

You got me there pal

I never really thought about compensating. Good idea to start off with 5.5 to 6 gallons though. I think I might do that with my next batch.

I always do 5.5.

I also mark my containers with 1 gal and 1/2 gal lines. I use my wife's red nail polish. It's been on there for years!

I have one bucket that came with marks, but my new bucket didn't. I keep forgetting to mark on the new bucket, so I just eye-ball the hell out of it and hope for the best.

I noticed that pouring the beer from the kettle through a fine mesh strainer, a little bit at a time, does a good job of removing the hops and grain trub. You end up aerating it quite a bit, but I then use the same strainer (rinsed in a clean sink filled with very lightly bleached water each time) to skim off some of the foam on top. Then I pitch the yeast and stir.

When I did this with my Kolsch, there was minimal trub in the bottom of the primary after a week. I looked like mostly spent yeast. Last night, I used this method again and ended up removing huge amounts of the hops from the wort. Cranted, some made it into the wort due to over-flows on the strainer, but I'm willing to keep a little bit in my beer to give it a little hoppier of a flavor.