london1o1
Member
I brewed my first all-grain batch about a week ago. We (I brew with a couple other guys) had a couple of major problems. This post is mostly looking for an answer to the second one, but I'd might as well throw the first one in here as well.
Problem 1: We were making a wheat wine, so we had a huge grain bill. We were told we needed a set amount of mash water and of sparge water for every pound of grain we used. This ended up being far more than we had space for in our 10 gal coolers or 15 gal brew kettle, so we lowered the quantities of grain (and lowered the quantity of hops in the boil), figuring we'd just brew a smaller batch of wheat wine. When we did our final sparge, we did as we had seen in multiple homebrewing videos we watched and sparged until all the sparge water was gone from the coolers. This didn't seem quite right, but we had been drinking during the whole process, and figured we'd better just stick to doing what they did in the videos. So we ended up with a 11+ gallon batch of a wheat beer of ~1.06 OG instead of like 5 gallons of a wheat wine of ~1.098 OG.
[short version of problem 1:]
I assume we were supposed to just sparge until we had reached the quantity of wort we were looking for (~6 gallons), and that in the videos, they were making smaller OG beer which ended up using all the sparge water to reach the intended wort size. Is this right?
Anyway, we did the boil, and the post-boil wort looked and smelled awesome, so we pitched some yeast and tossed it all in some fermention buckets. Well before this point, of course, we realized we weren't going to end up with a wheat wine, but we had made our peace with the idea of just having a lot more of a tasty wheat beer. Cue problem 2...
Problem 2: It never fermented. The fermentation buckets are at my friend's house, but he says the water in the air lock never bubbled. We used two vials of Dry English Ale (White Labs #WLP007). We had removed the vials from the fridge a few hours prior to pitching, shook thoroughly, pitched them both into the brew kettle of post-boil wort, stirred, and poured the wort into two separate plastic buckets. He says they started out in a part of the house where the temperature was ~68F, but after the air locks weren't bubbling for a few days, he moved them near a register and raised the heat to ~74F, trying to jump start the yeast. I don't know if any of this was a horrible idea, but I can't figure out why it wouldn't have started fermenting in the first few days. Does AG beer take longer to start to ferment than extract? Or is AG more inclined to need a big yeast starter than extract? We've always used 1 yeast vial for each 5 gallon batch of extract in the past, and never had a problem.
I was planning on picking up another vial and some DME, and making a big starter to repitch, hoping to save the batch. Is this a bad idea? Is there something else we should do instead? Is this batch just ruined?
Please help.
Problem 1: We were making a wheat wine, so we had a huge grain bill. We were told we needed a set amount of mash water and of sparge water for every pound of grain we used. This ended up being far more than we had space for in our 10 gal coolers or 15 gal brew kettle, so we lowered the quantities of grain (and lowered the quantity of hops in the boil), figuring we'd just brew a smaller batch of wheat wine. When we did our final sparge, we did as we had seen in multiple homebrewing videos we watched and sparged until all the sparge water was gone from the coolers. This didn't seem quite right, but we had been drinking during the whole process, and figured we'd better just stick to doing what they did in the videos. So we ended up with a 11+ gallon batch of a wheat beer of ~1.06 OG instead of like 5 gallons of a wheat wine of ~1.098 OG.
[short version of problem 1:]
I assume we were supposed to just sparge until we had reached the quantity of wort we were looking for (~6 gallons), and that in the videos, they were making smaller OG beer which ended up using all the sparge water to reach the intended wort size. Is this right?
Anyway, we did the boil, and the post-boil wort looked and smelled awesome, so we pitched some yeast and tossed it all in some fermention buckets. Well before this point, of course, we realized we weren't going to end up with a wheat wine, but we had made our peace with the idea of just having a lot more of a tasty wheat beer. Cue problem 2...
Problem 2: It never fermented. The fermentation buckets are at my friend's house, but he says the water in the air lock never bubbled. We used two vials of Dry English Ale (White Labs #WLP007). We had removed the vials from the fridge a few hours prior to pitching, shook thoroughly, pitched them both into the brew kettle of post-boil wort, stirred, and poured the wort into two separate plastic buckets. He says they started out in a part of the house where the temperature was ~68F, but after the air locks weren't bubbling for a few days, he moved them near a register and raised the heat to ~74F, trying to jump start the yeast. I don't know if any of this was a horrible idea, but I can't figure out why it wouldn't have started fermenting in the first few days. Does AG beer take longer to start to ferment than extract? Or is AG more inclined to need a big yeast starter than extract? We've always used 1 yeast vial for each 5 gallon batch of extract in the past, and never had a problem.
I was planning on picking up another vial and some DME, and making a big starter to repitch, hoping to save the batch. Is this a bad idea? Is there something else we should do instead? Is this batch just ruined?
Please help.
