13 Gallons of Vanished Wort??????

I am wondering this?

Did you graduate your sight glass in the HLT before you added your HERMS coil?

How long is your coil and what is the diameter? For this to be it, you would have to have one heck of a coil.....

I have to reply so I remember to check back later.... I want to hear what happened.

Unless you own cats... in which case, it IS aliens. ZCats are always to blame. Crazy story.

Couevas said:

I am wondering this?

Did you graduate your sight glass in the HLT before you added your HERMS coil?

How long is your coil and what is the diameter? For this to be it, you would have to have one heck of a coil.....

Click to expand...

Nope... calibrated the sites with the coil in the pot and all connected. The coild is only 25 feet of 1/2 in copper.

And no... no closure to the mysterious missing wort.... I was sick as a dog yesterday and didn't get a chance to just run some plain water tests. This weekend... for sure.

I'll be on during brew day tomorrow and will be sure to check in here. It's the great mystery of 2009!

I'm wondering: Since Jae was brewing too, did you check to see how much water he used in the other rig? Could be that he had some extra wort in his.

Sure you used a 1 gallon milk carton and not one of those smaller ones that are like 3/4 of a gallon?

Yes, I used a gallon jug... I'm positive...

I'm home now (vacation day) but I havev a conference call for work in ten minutes... as soon as that call is over I'm DOING the damn plain water test to see if I can come up with any ideas as to what the hell happened.

.... and no Rick... I'm pretty sure it didn't somehow jump space and time and end up in Jae's rig somoehow. He actually undershot by a hair as well on the batch he made. No where remotely cloe to what happened with me though.

Hopefully I'll have at least some info on this WEIRD f'in situation in a couple of hours

I'd blame the catz too, but we all know that they are only really after cheezburgers.

catz has my wort!!! I can has my wort back, pease!?!?


OK!!!! The test has officially been run!!!!!!!!!!!!

Total lost "wort" or plain old test water.... ZERO GALLONS!


WHAAAAAT THHHHHEEEEEEEE FFFFFFFFFUUUUDGE!?!?


- Filled HLT with 12 gallons
- Filled BK with 11 gallons
- Transferred 7 gallons from BK into MT.... Measured and ticked volume in MT
- NO change in HLT volume
- EMPTIED extra four gallons from BK to waste water.
- Checked MT and HLT... NO water loss in either.
- Pumped 7 gallons from MT into BK... Got SEVEN gallons
- Pumped all 12 from HLT into BK to similuate sparge...
- Then pumped entire MT into BK and got all 12 gallons...

So pumped 23 gallons in... tossed 4 to waste water and got 19 out!!!!


SONOFA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


So... the only variables as I see them are:

1) grains... absorbtion coulnd't have been THAT much
2) Temp... all of the pots are covered (except during boil and I factoered that in before) so I CAN"T be boiling off water... even then, it can't be THAT much
3) drinking and brewing... we were all having beers that day when I was brewing but c'mon!!! Seven guys who brew didn't have THAT much beer and we couldn't have all screwed up the observations THAT bad.

The freakin' mystery continues although the next step now is another batch!!

I gotta calibrate all of my thermometers to make sure they're all dead on and then it's another run (very likely next weekend)

I don't get it. damn catz

Totally bizarro. That's a lot of water to just up and disappear. I guess the real test is brewing another batch...

Think you need to make a batch of Damn Catz Ale then and see what happens...

whats the problem I always have vanishing wort.... About 6-8 weeks after I pitch its starts to vanish.....





it had to go somewhere . How many homebrews did you have during the process ?

any news on the mystery wort?

Post #50 has the details. Still a mystery...

Cape Brewing said:

...

.... and no Rick... I'm pretty sure it didn't somehow jump space and time and end up in Jae's rig somoehow. He actually undershot by a hair as well on the batch he made. No where remotely cloe to what happened with me though.

...

Click to expand...

Then maybe there IS a wort black hole in your garage. Your rig was closer to it than Jae's was.

homebeerbrewer said:

Then maybe there IS a wort black hole in your garage. Your rig was closer to it than Jae's was.

Click to expand...

There doesn't have to be a black hole you know...Some quantum physicists are suggesting that nature might be "non-local" meaning the wort could have gone down a drain on the other side of the world without affecting any of the space between :cross:

springer said:

whats the problem I always have vanishing wort.... About 6-8 weeks after I pitch its starts to vanish.....

it had to go somewhere . How many homebrews did you have during the process ?

Click to expand...

Not THAT many.

Regardless of how many I had, it has to be some kind of human error. I HAD to have thought I had more water in each of the BK and/or the HLT than I actually did. There's no other reasonable explanation.

We've all ticked through all sorts of little quirks that could have caused it to be off and none of them are the culprit. I ran the plain-water test to see what was going on and obviously REALLY paid attention every step of the way and it came out perfect, with no water loss. I HAD to have just simply screwed up with that first batch somehow.

We'll see. I think a basic bitter is on the docket for this weekend and we'll see what I get.

Cape Brewing said:

Regardless of how many I had, it has to be some kind of human error. I HAD to have thought I had more water in each of the BK and/or the HLT than I actually did. There's no other reasonable explanation.

Click to expand...

Brian, out of curiosity, did you put the water in the MT before the grains? I wasn't there for that part, but if you added the water after, that could explain some of the loss.

nope... added water before.

... and PTDB is actually almost right... I freakin' overshot today!!!!

I... have... NO... F'in CLUE what in holy hell went wrong with that first run but today couldn't have been more perfect. I had a 10 gallon batch of a 75 IBU IPA loaded up into Beersmith and instead of walking away with 10 gallons on the dot of 1070 wort, I ended up with about 10 1/2 gallons of 1072.

I had the brewhouse effeciency plugged into Beersmith for 70% so I'm just a hair over that at this point... which is certainly a step in the right direction.

The only thing I can think of on that first batch is that it was just plain old stupid idiot human error in a major way. How we managed that is way beyond me but I can't figure out any other explanation.

Hell... at this point... f' it... I'm on the right path now so who cares!?!?!!

Now... if you'll excuse me I have a Three Philosophers to finish.

One little thing... I did have to calibrate all of my thermometers (3)... one was off by about 7-8 degrees. That would help explain the really horrible efficiency but I am still totally stumped on how all of that wort "dissappeared" on the first run

I'm not looking to max out efficiency to the greatest extent possible. I'm really not that worried about it. I do think the efficiency will get better though because right now, after all the other freakin' over-the-top stuff I did on the rig, I have a freakin' tin pan with a dozen holes popped in it as my "sparge arm"... it just sits on top of the mash so my recirculation doesn't drill a hole straight through the whole grain bed.

Plus I have a high-torque, low-RPM motor that I want to mount for a motorized grain rake.

Either way... the contraption is officially up and running the way it's supposed to run.

An unhealthy amount of beer will now be made....

Moved as much OT stuff off the ranch. Keep it on topic please. Cape and PTN check your PM boxes. I need to know what to do with 50 useless posts.