A few minor problems.

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jmlivingston10

jmlivingston10
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hey everyone!
so my friend and I have been brewing for almost about a year now, and this is our 5th batch we just did, 2nd all grain batch. We did an IPA and I THOUGHT it was going to turn out well. We brewed saturday afternoon and put it in the primary saturday night. sunday night it was bubbling really hard, about 1 bubble every second, then yesterday the pressure in the air lock evened out and it stopped bubbling. should I be concerned, maybe dry hop and move to secondary?
also, we have been buying grains to yield about 5 gallons in the end, and have only been getting about 3.5 - 4 gallons. is there something we are doing wrong like maybe just not sparging long enough, or are we just not buying enough grains and using enough water? Our color usually starts out pretty dark, and then gets rather light, and I'm sure we have lost quite a bit of water during boiling process but I'm just not sure if we are missing anything here. any advice would help greatly.
thanks!
 
Wow, ok lots of questions there and we probably need more info to answer accurately. 1) If you just brewed on Saturday don't touch the beer! As I'm sure lots of people will tell you absence of airlock activity is not necessarily an absence of fermentation. The yeast need more than a few days to do their thing most of the time. I'd leave it alone for at least a week then test your gravity and see where you are.

2) For the efficiency, are you starting with sufficient volume to boil down to 5 gallons? You lose about 1 gallon per hour on most systems, and then you have other kettle loss from deadspace, hop absorption, etc. Usually for a 60 minute boil when I was doing 5 finished gallons I would start with 7 gallons of pre-boil wort. If you're not getting sufficient pre-boil volume, then you're likely not sparging long enough. What's your gravity during the sparge? Are you testing it with a refratometer? What's your pre-boil gravity? Post boil gravity? Are you hitting your target efficiency with the 4 gallons or are you above the target gravity? All these things will help us diagnose where your issue is occuring.
 
From my experience the first post from some of the big guns on here are going to ask for your recipes and water ratios used to brew. As for the IPA - I'd say let it sit for a good week, I'll doubt fermentation is done yet and even if it is close there is still a fair amount of work for the yeast to complete. When in doubt, sanitize and reach for your hydrometer. It's the only way you can really know what's going on in there.
 
Yeah, it's really impossible to know what is happening with your volume without knowing your recipe and process.

My guess is that when you calculate sparge water you are not taking into account boil off and/or you are not calculating for grain absorption. Are you using any software/tools to calculate your water volumes?
 
http://beerrecipes.org/showrecipe.php?recipeid=157

this was my beer recipe and i added orange rinds to the fermentor after the hop boil.

@ kellyk : my guess would be we aren't really planning on enough water and we are really bad at taking gravity readings. i took only one and that was prior adding yeast. and it was 1.08. hoe much extra do you think we should try to plan on if we want to yield about 5 gallons in the end? is there any sort of formula i could use?
 
[hoe much extra do you think we should try to plan on if we want to yield about 5 gallons in the end? is there any sort of formula i could use?

Yeah, there's a formula but it's pretty complicated.

Say you want to end up with 5 gallons and you're getting 3 1/2 gallons now. Subtract 3 1/2 from 5 and that gives you 1 1/2 gallons. So if you use an additional 1 1/2 gallons sparge water you should be fine.
 
http://beerrecipes.org/showrecipe.php?recipeid=157

this was my beer recipe and i added orange rinds to the fermentor after the hop boil.

@ kellyk : my guess would be we aren't really planning on enough water and we are really bad at taking gravity readings. i took only one and that was prior adding yeast. and it was 1.08. hoe much extra do you think we should try to plan on if we want to yield about 5 gallons in the end? is there any sort of formula i could use?

Honestly, I decided some time ago to stay away from BeerRecipes.org due to the fact that there really isn't any kind of peer review. You pretty well make those recipes blind... Not the point of your post, but just a side note.
 
@dragonlor20
is there any place out there that you would recommend? or do you just come up with your own recipes? if you make up your own is there any sort of formula or guidelines i should follow in doing that?
 
search for brewtarget. it's free and a guy fromn HBT has designed the software. He has some recipes in the program and you can design and import any you like.
 
@dragonlor20
is there any place out there that you would recommend? or do you just come up with your own recipes? if you make up your own is there any sort of formula or guidelines i should follow in doing that?

There are skads (that's a technical unit of measure) of recipes in the HBT Recipe section. (points up)

The longer threads have lots of replies, modificiations, photos of completed beers, etc. It's a great resource!
 
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