Made a Cream Ale yesterday. My second attempt at all grain. the first batch, a porter worked fine but I believe I made some mistakes on this one. first off I measured wrong and put too much water in mash. i put 2.5 gallons for 8 lbs grain. I'm not sure what problems that will cause. any ways i sparged until I had 6 gallons and then boiled. everything was going well until around 45 min I noticed it was already at 5 gallons my target volume. so I let it go another 5 min and then stopped the boil. My target gravity was 1.040 but it came in at 1.030.
Should I have boiled the full 60 min or am I looking at another problem.
There are a lot of variables in AG brewing you need to be aware of:
1.you used a ratio of 1.25qts/lb of grain which is fine, you can go up to 1.5 if you want.
2.Temperature of mash plays a par tin conversion
3.Quality of the crush-if the LHBS milled them for you it was probably a little course, have them run through twice for a finer crush and this will increase your mash/lauter efficiency
4.Learn how to take a pre-boil gravity reading to evaluate this efficiency number. this also gives you input in whether you need to increase boil time or add DME
5.Be sure your boil off rate is correct
6.Be sure you are using a calibrated thermometer and hydrometer and don't forget to temperature correct your hydrometer readings. Anything over 100F is not really accurate, the closer you can read at 60F is the best-did you do this with your readings?
It sounds as though you got a poor crush and poor conversion so your pre-boil reading would have been very low, even after the boil and condensing the wort your OG is low. How do you know you hit 5 gallons in 45 minutes? once the wort cools it shrinks, are you sure you had 5 gallons or did you then top off to 5 gallons? the addition of water would have also lowered your OG.
