Need a Second Opinion

I brewed BarleyWater's Dark Chocolate Stout recipe yesterday mostly according to the recipe. The only changes I made were to the hops, I used 2oz of Liberty and .5oz of Saaz. Both at 3.1% AAU and to the process, instead of a mash out I sparged the grain because I had the equipment to do it.

1st problem: I intended to make it 6 gallons like the recipe. I ended up with between 3 and 4 ish gallons. I was very careful about dedicating 4 gallons to the mash and 2 to the sparging process. It was a 90 minute boil. Could I have lost that much to the boil? I dont think so. But I need a second opinion. What can I do to fill that void? Boil, cool and add more water? Do I need to fill it at all?

2nd problem: My stout had a significantly higher gravity. I assume this was from ending up short by 2 or so gallons. His was 1.053, mine was 1.067.

statseeker said:

1st problem: I intended to make it 6 gallons like the recipe. I ended up with between 3 and 4 ish gallons. I was very careful about dedicating 4 gallons to the mash and 2 to the sparging process. It was a 90 minute boil. Could I have lost that much to the boil? I dont think so. But I need a second opinion.

Click to expand...

It sounds like you may not have used enough sparge water. What volume did you collect pre-boil?

It looked closer to 5 gallons maybe a little more. I couldnt get an exact measurement. Much more than ended up in the fermentor, that's for sure. I probably should have used another 3-4 gallons for sparge but I was following the recipe. Bleh. Any advice?

You did not use enough water. First you need to account for water absorbed by the grain & any dead space in your lauter ton. Second you need to account for boil off.

Boil off is different for everybody but it's probably somewhere between 5-15% of the volume per hour.

At this point you could add water to the fermenter to fix the beer.

statseeker said:

It looked closer to 5 gallons maybe a little more. I couldnt get an exact measurement. Much more than ended up in the fermentor, that's for sure. I probably should have used another 3-4 gallons for sparge but I was following the recipe. Bleh. Any advice?

Click to expand...

Sounds like you need to take some and mark the Gallons on your buckets & kettles. And figure out your boil off rate. For me I will boil off 1 3/4 gallons in an hour and from there I can adjust my sparge depending on the length I want to boil. So I will shoot for a pre-boil volume of 6 3/4 gallons. Are you Fly or Batch sparging?

statseeker said:

It looked closer to 5 gallons maybe a little more. I couldnt get an exact measurement. Much more than ended up in the fermentor, that's for sure. I probably should have used another 3-4 gallons for sparge but I was following the recipe. Bleh. Any advice?

Click to expand...

In reading back through BarleyWater's recipe thread, he didn't list sparge H20 in the recipe profile but said he usually collects a preboil volume around 7.5 gallons to end up with 6 gal after a 90 minute boil. As maida said, you can top up the fermenter with additional water at this point.

I'd recommend marking or notching either (or both) your brew kettle or brew paddle at 1 gallon and 1/2 gallon increments. On your next batch take note of preboil and postboil volumes to calculate your boil off rate. This can vary pretty wildly from brewhouse to brewhouse and is very useful to know when adapting recipes to your setup.

The biggest problem is definitely not accounting for the amount of water absorbed by the grains. Standard commercial breweries boil of 5% of the volume per hour. I use that when figuring and I'm pretty close.

Cool, at least I can add water at this stage of the process and not screw it up. I was fly sparging. I'm getting some good fermentation out of it so far. More oxygen probably doesnt hurt. I'll be calculating it a little better next time for sure. Calculate for 7.5. 4 on the mash and 3.5 on the sparge.

statseeker said:

Calculate for 7.5. 4 on the mash and 3.5 on the sparge.

Click to expand...

Grain will absorb around 1/10th of a gallon of water per pound of grain, so you should probably be planning on more water than 7.5 gallons to get 7 gal pre-boil, unless you're using less than 5 lbs of grain (which would absorb 1/2 gallon of water) and assuming you have absolutely no dead space in your MLT which is very unlikely... and I frankly can't imagine you'd be using less than 5 lbs of grain for a 5 gallon batch. That said, since you're fly sparging you don't have to worry too much about exactly how much water you need... You can make sure you've heated PLENTY of sparge water (like 2 or 4 gallons more than you think you'll need) and fly sparge until you hit your required pre-boil volume. You'll want to be monitoring what the SG is too. Like others said you need to have your collection vessel(s) marked so you know when you've arrived at that final pre-boil volume of course. The only downside is that nearing the end of the sparge you might run the risk of having your runnings fall below the sugar level at which husk tannins might begin to be extracted (SG of 1.008). So you can monitor the SG of the runnings closely to determine that. And if you fall short of gravity pts, then either make your final volume slightly less, or adjust the SG with DME, or you could probably just not worry about it.

Learning new things all the time. Awesome. I can add this to my experience for next brew. Like I said, the recipe didnt include fly sparging preboil volume, additions, etc. It just said 6 gallon batch. 4 for the mash-in, 2 for the mash out. So I did it with slight changes to the technique, but those changes made a major difference.

statseeker said:

Learning new things all the time. Awesome. I can add this to my experience for next brew. Like I said, the recipe didnt include fly sparging preboil volume, additions, etc. It just said 6 gallon batch. 4 for the mash-in, 2 for the mash out. So I did it with slight changes to the technique, but those changes made a major difference.

Click to expand...

Our shared experiences here make us all better brewers, that is the beauty of HBT.

In that recipe the 2 gallon mashout is designed to end the mash by raising the mash temp over 170~ to stop the enzyme production prior to sparging. This Palmer chapter is a good quick read on mashout/lautering:

http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter17.html

Very useful in the amounts of water to use during sparging. Will definitely have those notes on hand for any future recipes that mention mash out but not sparge volumes.

I added 2.5 gallons of boiled and cooled water to the beer today and gave it a good stir with a sanitized racking cane. The yeast seems to be happy with the addition. Now it looks like I have about 5-5.5 gallons of beer. The adjusted gravity of the beer is now 1.042, 0.025 or so below what it was previously. Hopefully the addition wont affect the heaviness of the stout or the taste.

Crapppp,

Barleywater did list the preboil volume after a sparge of 7.5 gallons but I only printed out the recipe, not the later posts. Should have printed more. My fault.

<<<<<I'm with stupid. Haha.

Well, the taste was affected quite a bit. It is significantly watered down. I have a feeling after carb that it will be a fairly dry stout. Not at all as creamy as I wanted it. Head is not at all dark, but a kind of tan color. This brew is not what I wanted it to be, but drinkable. Just carb up and drink until it's gone. Moving on to a saison next. Will revisit in January.