First GF AG test batch

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mergs

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So all in all things went sorta OK and its been an exciting process. Here's what I did and I'll ask a question or two and hope to hear some helpful comments on my process.

This was basically an attempt at this single infusion mash:

http://www.glutenfreehomebrewing.org/all_grain_brewing_tutorial.php

This is a 1 gal test version of an IPA here:
http://www.glutenfreehomebrewing.org/showrecipe.php?recipeid=141
I omitted the buckwheat.

Same grain bill, total was 2.9 lbs of grains (omitted the buckwheat) as described in recipe + 1 lb of rice hulls. I heated 1 gal water to strike temp, lined the pot with a biab bag, and stirred in half the grains, then the 2nd half. Maybe I made a mistake here but there simply wasn't enough water . I probably need to factor in the rice hulls as "grain" for water calculation. I heated 1/2 gal more water and stirred that in and the water amount looked good based on biab videos I've seen. After about 2 hours in the kettle mashing, I drained the first runnings (squeezed bag) and got a 1.053 sg. I then sparged with about 0.5 gals of 170F water and that running was 1.023. I thought about not adding the second runnings to the first knowing it will reduce my OG but I did anyway and I now have a combined OG of 1.041 and about 1.5g of wort.

I'm now in *session* Pale Ale territory but I'm not too unhappy. The first runinging we're 1.053 which I was jazzed about. I don;t think I will do a sparge next time, doesn't seem worth it.

Another mistake I made was that I forgot to add in amylase until after I added the strike water, so I had to a quick fix: I raised the bag, stirred in the amylase (as well as my gypsum and ph stabilizer). I guess I got focused in too much on the grains.

So the wort tastes really nice. Its sweet but I don't think I got a full conversion as it may be starchy. I'm going to run out to the LHBS and get some iodophor and do a starch test. If it fails, I'm going to raise the temp to a range that is ideal for the amylase and let it sit for an hour and re-test. I don't know if I bungled the conversion due to the amylase not being well stirred into the strike water but I'm hoping I can fix this with a second "mash" step (without the grains).

Later tonight, I'll hopefully continue with the boil and hops additions.

If anyone has any hints or comments, fire away! I am really stoked to have finally done an AG batch and I am really glad that I did a test batch as I would have burned through a lot of grain on this experiment. Now I can to this 2-3 times more and practice and experiment with things!

I'm thinking that should I add some fermentable (candi, turbinado, BRS, etc?) to bump my OG up to the 1.050-1.060 range. I don't want to use sorghum though because I want to taste the millet. I'm thinking turbinado sugar. Anyone have a though on that? Target OG was 1.059.
 
Update: Starch test appeared OK and the wort tasted sweet. I added 4oz of turbinado and my OG is 1.070. Oh boy this one's gonna be a little boozy!

I got about .75 gals from the kettle and its in a sanitized distilled water jug pitched with s-05 at around 68F.

Gonna cover it and hope for the best.

I need to sit down and digest a lot of lessons learned. I bungled a few basics but things seem to have turned out OK. One thing I need to pay attention to more is:

mash temps
volumes, before and after as well as a correct water/grain ratio (i think rice hulls may need to be included in the grain wt for that calc)
speaking of rice hulls, i think i can get away with a lot less than the 25-30% rate I used. i was dreading a huge massive dough ball, which i didn't get.

I'm a happy boy tonight, all in all.
 
Awesome! Congrats.

Just to answer some of your questions; yes, you need to account for the rice hulls and, no, you probably don't need any in BIAB. The bag acts as a filter and rice hulls are not necessary.

Sparging isn't totally needed in BIAB. However, it will up your efficiency a little. Many people pull the bag out, squeeze, and then let drain for a while. A quick rinse helps.

Your SG might have only been 1.041 but, this increases much higher on small batches due to a higher percentage of boil off.

Use this trick to figure an estimate for OG: (pre-boil volume × pre-boil gravity)/(estimated post boil volume) = estimated OG. You have to convert your hydro readings to "points" to make it work. So 1.041 = 41. Get it? This is only an estimate. Factor in losses to be more accurate. 3/4 of a gallon made it to the fermenter but, you probably left .25 or so in the kettle.
 
Osedax, thanks for answering and confirming a few suspicions I had!

I'll wind back my use of rice hulls for sure. One less thing to stock!

Sparging: I think I will re-classify what I did. I think it was a quick rinse with a little too much water. ;) I called it a sparge but it was probably more harm than good.

Next time I may rinse with a lot less water just to get a bit of residual sugars off, or perhaps next time omit rinsing and just squeezing. I let the bag sit and drain out into a colander inside a pot. Got some more wort that way. I also did a bit of a press down with a lid and that got a bit more. So we'll see, I may just omit the rinse. Time will tell.

You are right on the boil off. I did some math to get me to the high '50s SG from 1.041 and it got me way up to 1.070! The math didn't account for boil off so I think that's where I ramped up the OG so high. I basically got 10 extra points unexpectedly.

I'll give that formula a try. As for points you'd mean that you plug in the points (like 41, not 1.041) into that formula for "pre-boil gravity"?
 
That is correct on the points. If you don't, the formula gets wonky. Example is pre-boil is 1.050 at 1.5 gallons and post boil volume is estimated to be 1 gallon. So it would be 50 × 1.5 = 75. 75/1 = 75. Post boil OG estimate is 1.075.
 
Bottled this last night:

OG 1.070
FG 1.020 (but I made a rookie mistake and took the hydro sample after priming sugar addition, doh! So I can probably subtract a couple of points for the sugar and call it 1.017)

This should put me in the high 6, low 7 abv range. :tank:

Amazing pungent aroma from the citra and cascade dry hops. My wife came down and worried that the cat pissed somewhere downstairs LOL. I think that's the Citra.

Tasted pretty sweet and had an unidentifiable off taste that I can't begin to identify... more of an aftertaste. Drinkable but seems like a mild flaw. Hoping that its nothing permanent and it conditions out.

I got 4 bombers and a glass of warm wort (dregs mainly). I will crack bottle 1 in 2-3 weeks.
 
Awesome. Fun fact time. Women are more genetically predispositioned to smell the "cat pee" like odors of citra, amarillo, etc. So you smell resinous citrus fruit and she smells pee. Aren't genetics and beer fun?! :p
 
Well, this test batch was tasted last weekend (1st bottle of 4) and this is probably my first bad batch of beer. It was a sour IPA. Both me and a friend tried at the trailhead after a ride and we both spit it out. I'm at a loss as to what went wrong. Sourness may be bacterial. It wasn't super sour but it was plain that it was "off". I'll test another bottle in a week. I did detect an off flavor at primary and at bottling so I think the whole batch will suck. Hell, maybe I just don't like Citra dominant IPAs. i think i hated a SMaSH Citra IPA from some Portland brewery. maybe something else.

I since did a 5 gal batch, possibly mentioned in another thread (I should probably write that up too). I was really really worried about this batch since I brewed it between this bad batch and the time above when I sampled the 1st bottle and spit it out trail-side.

The good news is, unlike the test 1 gal batch here, the 5 gal batch *seems* OK. NO initial off flavors in the raw unpitched wort. I let it go 14 days in primary. Fermentation took off fast, was very active requiring a blow off, and continued for at least 7 days actively and was getting a bubble occasionally for a few days after that. All of my past GF batches fermented ok but they were not overly active, and ended quicker. The liberally oxygenated by hand (I've borrowed O2 in the past) and then pitched 2 packets of re-hydrated S-05 (I always pitched 1 packet of non-re-hydrated yeast in the past, so that or the shear doubling up on the cell count made a huge difference).

I'm at 1.010 or 1.011 now and I'm about 6% abv. Not too shabby. I've never gone below 1.018 on my GF batches in the past.

Following Igs recipe advice, I added a 2.4 oz of dry hops to primary not sec and altered the hop bill a bit (i didn't have 2.5 of Centennial on hand so I decided to mix things up and added .6 ea of Simcoe, Centennial, Apollo and Amarillo).

The taste is really nice. The mouth feel is so unlike the extract batches I've done its striking. I gave my wife a sip of the gravity sample and she likes it and she's not a fan of ipas... I just wanted to know if there were any off flavors, she said nope.

I am pretty excited. especially since my 1 gal test batch i bottled seems to have not gone well. When I tasted the first test batch my heart sunk thinking that this 5 gal batch would be bad too.

5 gal batch is currently Dry hopping for 5, then cold crash in secondary (another new step for me, via Igs) then kegging in 5 days or so. fingers x-ed.
 
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You dry hopped in the primary? Why is that? I'm curious because I dry hopped my last batch secondary like usual, but it has hardly any strong hop aroma.
 
You dry hopped in the primary? Why is that? I'm curious because I dry hopped my last batch secondary like usual, but it has hardly any strong hop aroma.

Sure. I feel to answer I need to back up and veer off slightly topic: I have been internally debating (in my own mind) the usefulness of racking at all to secondary and due to my lazy nature have been leaning towards no secondary at all. Its been a publicly debated topic as well and many people that are considered authorities (Palmer for one) don't recommend using a secondary in many cases (one exception would be introduction of fruit which would be best if done in secondary, and maybe very long fermentation where you want to avoid autolysis). You can research the why but its mainly that the benefits don't appear to outweigh the cons: the cons being an extra step in the process, a chance of introducing oxygen or worse into your wort, etc).

Thus for dry hopping I wait until fermentation is complete (no bubbling at all) and simply drop in the hops there. Easy and simple.

The short answer: the original recipe from Igs at Ghostfish says to dry hop in primary then cold crash in secondary :)

As for the lack of a strong hop aroma, are you using a bag or are you adding he hops directly into the wort? Are your hops fresh?
 
I'm familiar with the no-secondary discussion. I was going to go that route as well, but in the three GF batches I've brewed, I've always had a lot of sediment, so I kept using the secondary as a way to get the beer off the trub and get more to settle out. But then again, I've never used a fining agent, so that's a whole separate discussion.

As for the hops, my last batch was the first time I used a hop bag rather than putting the pellets directly in the beer. Again, this was an attempt to reduce sediment. But it sounds like that may have been part of the problem. Other variables that changed were the type of hops, but I used the exact same weight as previous batches.

The hop schedule (for 3 gal batch) was
12 g warrior 60 mins
12 g centennial 30 mins
12 g centennial 15 mins
15 g cascade 1 min
~34 g centennial dry hop

I'm going to brew a 4th batch today, and maybe I will try the primary only experiment.
 
Also, I do have the ability to cold crash, but I've never done it. I'm concerned with suck back and getting oxygen into the beer, but no one on this forum seems to have the same concern. If you lower the temp, air has to enter your container to balance the pressure, right? Thus disturbing the protective CO2 layer and introducing oxygen.

I guess one way to get around that (just thinking of this now) is to make sure the secondary is as full of beer as possible, that way there is minimal air to expand/contract. Would you still need to use an S-style airlock or would 3 piece be okay?

Edit: Sorry for hijacking!
 
Use the S-style rather than 3-pc, in my (little) experience.
There are some on this forum that even put large balloons over airlocks to capture CO2 on fermentation to be sucked back on cold crash. Seems a bit much, since people have been cold crashing forever without issue.
 
JMath, no problemo, I like the discussion here.

Yep, same debate I've been having about secondary. Believe me, the sediment issue drives a lot of the experimentation. i was doing secondary for a while then backed away from it, then went to a cold crash recently. I have to say doing a primary only with no cold crash is going to be the most sediment laden beer. Using a secondary with no cold crash is next best for sediment and for me my best results have been using primary only, hop sock and then a cold crash. I haven't been formerly recording my process and then recording an sediment level but that's my general feeling on all the batches I've done. This includes ~12 extract and 2 AG batches.

In my experience I think use hop bags affect the release of aromas in a dry hopping scenario but they do reduce the sediment. Its a trade off and I'm leaning towards using some sort of hop sock going forward but would like to find a better way to get the hops in contact with the beer. Nothing beats dropping the pellets into the wort directly, until you deal with the mess when you rack. i've seen a 2-3" diameter, stainless steel mesh tube that is used which look promising but pricey (think of a large bazooka filter). and I've heard of people using teabag balls and I've seen someone zip tie or rubberband together 2 ss mesh colanders together too, which in essence is a large teabag strainer. i may experiment with some of these techniques. I also think moving the bag around would help but popping the lid once a day to do that is of high concern.

i never thought about the suck back during cold crash. I had a 3 piece airlock on there while it was in cold crash and I don't taste any oxygen effects on the beer I just produces so I can only assume that any air sucked back in was negligible and the layer of CO2 in the headspace protected the beer from any small amounts of 02 in the air. No wet cardboard taste in this batch.
 
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