I'm no expert, but I've got a good number of brews under my belt I can pretty well design and execute recipes from beer smith with repeatable results.... until yesterday.
I brewed a recipe for an AIPA that I've done before (sadly this is even for a small comp.). It's actually one of my favorite brews. It is mainly pale malt with some crystal and then enhanced with 3# DME. I was extra careful as I mentioned it was for comp. Did it Sat morning and didn't touch any beer to my lips or have any distractions. Did my water conditioning and measured water out by the gallon and quart. Checked it against my marked yard stick. Checked pre-fermentation gravities with hydrometer and refractometer. Everything went pretty smoothly although the hot Louisiana afternoon made it's presence known and the boil off was like 25%. This is not too out of the ordinary though and usually just requires top off (my brew buddies get the same thing from time to time), but when pitching I realized something had gone horribly wrong and the numbers don't make sense to me. If anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them. I can only think that I got horrible efficiency and bad measurements caused me to not notice it until the end, but considering the double checking I did it seems very odd.
Into boiler 6gal @ 7 Brix, 1.028 --> matches recipe est
Add DME for 13 Brix, 1.053 --> matches recipe est
Into Fermenter = 3.5gal @ 15.4 Brix, 1.063 --> should have been min of 4.3gal and gravity in 70s
After top off of 1.5gal = 11.9 Brix, 1.048 --> a 6.6% brew is now 4.8% optimistically!
I mean to get those sorts of miscalculations my volume into the boiler would have been off by almost 1.5 gallons meaning both my grain would have been a super sponge and my measuring stick would have been off by almost 2 inches. Also, all other measurements were with the same stick so how did it read the other volumes correctly? I mean it said 3.5 post boil and so do the marks on the fermenter. I'm just at a complete loss right now. This puts my eff. at like 47% and it's never been lower than 65% when I first started using this equip.
So depressed right now. I don't even have an extra fermenter empty to redo it and the comp forms have been sent.
I brewed a recipe for an AIPA that I've done before (sadly this is even for a small comp.). It's actually one of my favorite brews. It is mainly pale malt with some crystal and then enhanced with 3# DME. I was extra careful as I mentioned it was for comp. Did it Sat morning and didn't touch any beer to my lips or have any distractions. Did my water conditioning and measured water out by the gallon and quart. Checked it against my marked yard stick. Checked pre-fermentation gravities with hydrometer and refractometer. Everything went pretty smoothly although the hot Louisiana afternoon made it's presence known and the boil off was like 25%. This is not too out of the ordinary though and usually just requires top off (my brew buddies get the same thing from time to time), but when pitching I realized something had gone horribly wrong and the numbers don't make sense to me. If anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them. I can only think that I got horrible efficiency and bad measurements caused me to not notice it until the end, but considering the double checking I did it seems very odd.
Into boiler 6gal @ 7 Brix, 1.028 --> matches recipe est
Add DME for 13 Brix, 1.053 --> matches recipe est
Into Fermenter = 3.5gal @ 15.4 Brix, 1.063 --> should have been min of 4.3gal and gravity in 70s
After top off of 1.5gal = 11.9 Brix, 1.048 --> a 6.6% brew is now 4.8% optimistically!
I mean to get those sorts of miscalculations my volume into the boiler would have been off by almost 1.5 gallons meaning both my grain would have been a super sponge and my measuring stick would have been off by almost 2 inches. Also, all other measurements were with the same stick so how did it read the other volumes correctly? I mean it said 3.5 post boil and so do the marks on the fermenter. I'm just at a complete loss right now. This puts my eff. at like 47% and it's never been lower than 65% when I first started using this equip.
So depressed right now. I don't even have an extra fermenter empty to redo it and the comp forms have been sent.