Rye Ale Problem

Doing my second brew rye brew.
The first was extract + grains.
This time all grain (BIAB) and I up'd it from 1 g to 1.75 g.

Problem,
After draining and mashing the grain I only have 1 gallon of wort.
The grains are very wet after squeezing and mashing w/a coffee cup.
Thinking about doing a sparge w/a gallon of 170* water.

What do you think?

Used

No replys so I went ahead and poured a gallon of 170* water thru the grain bag. Squezzed the hell out of it and must have done a better job than the first squeezing as I wouldn up w/a bit over 2 gallons. Boiled it down to 2 and then began the 1 hour boil.

Brew House Eff was only 64.4% But the final OG was 1.060, five points above the BS est.
Post Boil vol. was 1.5 g. Debated on adding water to 1.75 and decided not to. Lets see now what the final FG will be.

Man that Rye really sucked up water.

How much grain did you have and how much water did you mash with? My system is not BIAB. But I do mash in a 10 gal Gott cooler and batch sparge. Rule of thumb is that you will lose about .1 gallon of water for every pound of grain due to absorption. My system is actually at .16 gallons per pound consistently.

Formula is fairly straightforward. The first couple of times you brew, measure how much grain you use, how much water goes in, and how much water comes out when you drain your mash tun.

For instance (in the interest of making the numbers easy to work with), let's say you have 8 pounds of grain and want to mash at 1.5 quarts per pound.

8 (lbs of grain) X 1.5 (qts per lb) = 12 (quarts of water you should mash with)

12 (quarts) / 4 (number of qts in a gallon) = 3 (gallons of mash water to use)

So let's say then that you put in that 3 gallons of water and mash as usual. Then you drain the mash tun and only get 2.2 gallons back. You've lost .8 gallons. So now you use the following equation to figure out what your particular system's loss to absorption is:

.8 (amount of water lost) / 8 (pounds of grain mashed) = .1 (amount of water absorbed by each pound of grain when mashing with your system)

Record this over a couple of batches. It took me 3 or 4 batches to confirm that my number was .16.

Once you have your number dialed in, you can use it each time when calculating your mash and sparge water assumptions.

You just use the equation
Amount of grain used X Your system's Absorption = Amount of water you will lose during mash.

This has been helpful to me in batch sparging. I calculate quarts per pound to figure out how much water to use during the mash. Then I use the absorption equation to figure out how much wort will come back out when I drain the tun the first time.

I can subtract the amount of wort I know I will get from the total pre-boil volume I am shooting for and know exactly how much water I will need for sparge (absorption is not a factor on the sparge because the grain has already hit its absorbtion threshhold. This means I will not lose any more water on my sparge and can count on the same amount of water going in and coming back out on the sparge).

This has helped me hit my pre-boil volumes a lot more consistently

This was my brew:

Amt Name Type # %/IBU
6.4 oz Rice Hulls (0.0 SRM) Adjunct 1 8.1 %
3 lbs 8.0 oz Rye Malt (4.7 SRM) Grain 2 71.1 %
3.2 oz Melanoiden Malt (20.0 SRM) Grain 4 4.1 %
1.1 oz Black (Patent) Malt (500.0 SRM) Grain 5 1.4 %
0.20 oz Pearle [8.00 %] - Boil 60.0 min Hop 6 16.6 IBUs
0.10 oz Hallertauer [4.80 %] - Aroma Steep 0.0 min Hop 9 0.0 IBUs
2.00 oz Malto-Dextrine (Boil 5.0 mins) Other 8 -
1.0 pkg SafAle English Ale (DCL/Fermentis #S-04) [23.66 ml] Yeast 10 -
0.05 oz Hallertauer [4.80 %] - Boil 10.0 min Hop 7 0.9 IBUs
12.0 oz Vienna Malt (3.5 SRM) Grain 3 15.2 %

BeerSmith said I need 2.35 gallons of water for this BIAB brew.
After the 1 hour mash and draining I only had 1 gallon left.
Never lost so much before in other BIAB brews.
Perhaps Rye just sucks up more water than barley.

Thanks for your figures, I'm keeping good notes. Should have this down pat in a few more brews.

you shouldn't squeeze you grains as it releases bitter tannins. a sparge of 170 would have been more effective at extracting the sugars tied up in your grains.

clafty said:

you shouldn't squeeze you grains as it releases bitter tannins. a sparge of 170 would have been more effective at extracting the sugars tied up in your grains.

Click to expand...

Not according to BIAB theory. It is recommended to sqeeze the hell out of the grain bag from what I've read.

Sorry, I haven't read about that. I just know you aren't supposed to in a partial mash, not sure why it's different in a BIAB.

Well today I grabbed the fermenter to bottle and with the cover off it smelled a little sour. Racked to bottling bucket. There was a lot of trub floating and even more on the bottom of the fermenter.

Took a FG reading and it was high 1.024, expected 1.016. Tasted sample and ugg, very sour. Decided to bottle anyway Got 8 bottles w/a lot of "stuff" floating n them. Lets see what happens in a few weeks or more.

Had some left over on the bottom of the bottling bucket and put it in a glass. After 5 hours a lot of the sediment dropped out and it didn't taste as bad as before. Maybe it will not be a total loss.

Didn't see anything bad floating when I cracked the fermenter. There was something that looked like little yeastys floating.