Maxed out my equipment today

I brewed a potentially tremendous beer today and tested the limits of my setup.

In a 48 Quart cooler with sparge arm and pickup, I brewed this;

Christmas Stout 2006

25 lbs Pale Ale Malt
3 lbs Choc Malt
1,5 lbs Roasted Barley
1.5 lbs Caramel 80L
1 lb Victory Malt
1 lb flaked barley
1/4 lb Black Patent

120 Minute Mash

My temp variation was 2 degrees.

Sparge 170 degrees gathering 14 1/2 gallons

3 oz Centennial at First Wort
1 oz Centennial at 30 minute
2 oz Cascade 5 minute
8 oz Dextrin 5 minute
Irish Moss 15 minute

120 Minute boil

Ran off 11 Gallons of delicious, complex wort into 3 carboys (2 - 6.5 gallon, 1 - 1 gallon).

Pitched with 3/4 gallon starter of White Labs WLP 001 Calif Ale and White Labs WLP715 Champagne yeast.

OG was 1.050 on the nose.

I have activity after 3 hours and am keeping my fingers crossed.


This is the maximum I can possibly brew with my existing setup and I am looking forward to a tasty, compicated beer with nice mouth feel and a uber clean finish.

Thoughts anyone?

I would love to know my efficiency if one of you happens to know it.

Cheers,

knewshound

That's pretty impressive. 33 pounds of grain in a 48 quart cooler. I have a 48 quart Igloo IceCube cooler, and when I did 15 pounds of grain in it, it appeared to be roughly half full. Must have been a pretty tight fit.

Seems like a lot of hops, even for 11 gallons. But it sounds very interesting, for sure.

A quick Pro Mash calc has you at 48%, but I could have done something terribly wrong

Yup - 47.5% efficiency (based on promash defaults - for the american variety of each malt you listed)

Here's how you can calculate it:
Pale Malt (2-row) = 36 gravity points /lb (possible - 100% eff.)
Chocolate malt = 29 possible pts/lb
Roasted barley = 28 possible points/lb
Caramel 80L = 33 possible pts/lb
Victory = 34 possible pts/lb
Flaked barley = 32 poss pts/lb
Patent = 28 poss pts/lb

You used:
Pale malt = 25lbs * 36 pts = 900 poss. pts
Chocolate malt = 3lbs * 29 pts/lb = 87 poss. pts
Roasted barley = 1.5lbs * 28 points/lb = 42 pts
Caramel 80L = 1.5lbs * 33 pts/lb = 49.5 pts
Victory = 1lb * 34 pts/lb = 34 pts.
Flaked barley = 1lb * 32 pts/lb = 32 pts
Patent = .25lb * 28 pts/lb = 14 pts
TOTAL POSSIBLE GRAVITY POINTS = 1158.5

You got (from mash):
11 gallons * 50 gravity pts = 550 points.

Efficiency = 550/1158.5 = 47.5%

I knew it was low efficency but DAMN thats low.

I suspect I just did not have enough sparge for the volume of grain I had.

On the plus side, it is not as bitter as I suspected it might be with so many speciality grains, which is a good thing.

Oh well, grain is cheap, right?

LOL

Thanks guys.

knewshound

Why pitch the Champagne yeast? Won't that make it very dry with the 1.050 gravity?

Hope you have a blowoff tube on that sucker! That's a big starter!

Adding the champagne yeats was to achieve exactly what you alluded to, a dry clean finish.

In some previous stouts, I ended up with a syrupy texture at the finish and I much prefer my stouts to have a dry, crisp finish.

And oh yeah, it was UBER active. Blew off a 6 1/2 gallon carboy with a foot of head room in 5 hours.

I dropped the temps into the mid 60's until it settled down and have raise it back to 70 now that it is a little less active.

It was a continous output of CO2, not bubbles but a stream of CO2 like a air hose.

Active enough you think ?

LOL

I cant wait for this to finish, it is one of the best tasting worts I have ever made in 250 batches.

I was going to bottle this for Chrstms presents but am re-thinking it now, this is too good to waste on Bud drinkers.

Cheers,

knewshound

Are you using Dry yeast? I'm not sure I would have used champagne yeast for a beer, but hey... as long as it works. Just too many liquid yeasts that would be great for Stouts.

I have heard of waiting for the beer yeast to finish and then adding champagne yeast to boost the alcohol/dryness afterwards, but 2 yeasts at the same time? I thought that was inadvisable due to yeast competition creating off flavors?

Also, to achieve maximum dryness, you could have just added crushed beano tabs or amylase to the fermenting wort. Champagne yeast would only be necessary to ferment past the beer yeast's alcohol tolerance level, which, with a 1050 SG I don't think you will reach.

There was a recent article abotu Beano. I'll try to find the article, but I would not go there. There seems to be problems with excessive foaming. What happens is that the beano slows down the fermentation. You think it's done and its not. So it becomes excessivly carbonated. I'll try to find the article when I get back from NY for clarification.

Beer Snob said:

There was a recent article abotu Beano. I'll try to find the article, but I would not go there. There seems to be problems with excessive foaming. What happens is that the beano slows down the fermentation. You think it's done and its not. So it becomes excessivly carbonated. I'll try to find the article when I get back from NY for clarification.

Click to expand...

Well, pro brewers use enzymes to achieve maximum dryness, so what do they do? I would assume they have some way of denaturing the enzymes once the appropriate dryness level has been achieved.

Well I racked it to the secondary last night and I am happy to report it is delicious.

Creamy mouth feel, high tones of chocolate, nuts and a backbeat of peat.

It has a very "chewy" texture and a lingering rich finish.

Not quite the "dry" finish I was looking for but I will see what happens in the secondary. It is still several weeks away from being finished so time will tell.

You guys had me questioning my technique on this and I was happy to see it coming out delicious. I had made nearly this same brew for Xmas 92 and it was one of my favorites and I was relieved to see I wasnt losing my mind after all.

Thanks for the comments and encouragement.

Cheers,

knewshound

Teedocious said:

Yup - 47.5% efficiency (based on promash defaults - for the american variety of each malt you listed)

Here's how you can calculate it:
Pale Malt (2-row) = 36 gravity points /lb (possible - 100% eff.)
Chocolate malt = 29 possible pts/lb
Roasted barley = 28 possible points/lb
Caramel 80L = 33 possible pts/lb
Victory = 34 possible pts/lb
Flaked barley = 32 poss pts/lb
Patent = 28 poss pts/lb

You used:
Pale malt = 25lbs * 36 pts = 900 poss. pts
Chocolate malt = 3lbs * 29 pts/lb = 87 poss. pts
Roasted barley = 1.5lbs * 28 points/lb = 42 pts
Caramel 80L = 1.5lbs * 33 pts/lb = 49.5 pts
Victory = 1lb * 34 pts/lb = 34 pts.
Flaked barley = 1lb * 32 pts/lb = 32 pts
Patent = .25lb * 28 pts/lb = 14 pts
TOTAL POSSIBLE GRAVITY POINTS = 1158.5

You got (from mash):
11 gallons * 50 gravity pts = 550 points.

Efficiency = 550/1158.5 = 47.5%

Click to expand...

just wondering, but with an efficency so low couldn't you take another 10 gallons and get half of the remaining sugars out of the grainbed then just boil it down to a 5 gallon batch. Of course this will be more caramelized, much more, the character of this beer would be completely different than that of the prevous batch but hey! It would be a freebie batch, right? Just save some yeast from an old yeast cake somewhere and toss it in so you can keep them costs down on the freebie batch! :rockin:

Grimsawyer said:

just wondering, but with an efficency so low couldn't you take another 10 gallons and get half of the remaining sugars out of the grainbed then just boil it down to a 5 gallon batch. Of course this will be more caramelized, much more, the character of this beer would be completely different than that of the prevous batch but hey! It would be a freebie batch, right? Just save some yeast from an old yeast cake somewhere and toss it in so you can keep them costs down on the freebie batch! :rockin:

Click to expand...

Yes, yes you could. In fact I did that today. My normal efficiency is about 80% (based on the promash default values). I made a barleywine that was big (OG 108) - since your efficiency goes down a lot when you make such a big beer (unless you want to collect a bunch of wort & boil for 10 hours) you have a lot of sugar yet to be extracted still in the mash.

In my case today, I mashed 30lbs of grain & I sparged out 6.5 gallons of 91 gravity wort (this boiled down to 5.5 gal of OG 108).

At this point I only had 55% efficiency on the mash (591pts/1080pts=54.7%).

After I collected the barleywine wort, I kept on sparging & collected 6.5gal. of 42 gravity wort (boiled down to 5.5gal of OG 50). As you put it - that's a FREE beer!

Total efficiency for the whole mash: 55% first batch + 25% = 80% total eff.

Not too shabby - plus I got 5.5 extra gallons of beer...