Longer boil to adjust FG?

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jiggs_casey

jiggs_casey

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I'm new to Beersmith and trying to get things as close as possible to what 'it' says where I should be.

I pulled a sample from my boil at the 60 minute mark to see how close it was to what Beersmith says it should be. It's off. So is my post boil volume by over a gallon. I don't have anything handy to add to the boil to try and get it to where it should be so, can I just do a longer boil to increase my FG?

Should have been 1.053
Is 1.032
 
A longer boil will increase your gravity, but you will lose volume obviously. Another option would be to add a calculated amount of extract to the boil to make up for the gravity difference. Yet another option would be to blend the lower gravity batch with a higher gravity batch.
 
Cool, that's kinda what I was looking for. I'm not too concerned with the loss of volume at this point as I usually account for a half gallon every 30 minutes or so. Which means for me, a 60 minute boil means I need a pre boil volume of somewhere between 6 and 6.5 gallons for a final, post boil volume of 5 gallons. I think what is tripping me up is according to Beersmith, and I'm playing by it's rules, my pre boil was well over 7 gallons. On a 60 minute boil, that says I'm going to have a lot of wort left over that is going to go to waste. I don't lose much at all between transfering between boil kettle to primary, primary to bottling bucket and then into bottles. So, to me the 7 gallons is really high.
 
Beersmith volume calculations are not very accurate in my experience. I always ignored them. I actually stopped using it completely when I got an iPhone. I found the BrewPal app to give me really accurate calculations for my system, so I just use that now.
 
Important to note that the longer the hops boil the higher the IBU contributions will be...

Is this an AG kit? If so you should have found the shortcomings of OG when you did a pre-boil grav check ( you did one of those RIGHT?) then adjusted your boil time and hop schedule accordingly.

If this is an extract kit, then your gravity cant be that far off if you added the right amount of extract and water...
 
Short answer, yes, boiling longer will increase your starting gravity.

However, it will make your beer much more bitter since you will be boiling the hops longer. My recommendation would be to just cool it, pitch your yeast and see how it turns out, and figure out why your SG was low and correct next time. I've had beers that were way off where they were supposed to be(higher and lower), as well as the occasional brew where it's spot on, and I've never made a "bad" beer where it wasn't drinkable. In fact I've had some extemely good beers where my SG and FG weren't anywhere close to what the recipe called for.

Just my $0.02
 
dummkauf said:
However, it will make your beer much more bitter since you will be boiling the hops longer.
Click to expand...

thats a bit of an exageration. utilization barely increases beyond 60mins, you probably won't be able to tell the difference (assumming only you're bittering add is getting the extended time)
 
dcp27 said:
thats a bit of an exageration. utilization barely increases beyond 60mins, you probably won't be able to tell the difference (assumming only you're bittering add is getting the extended time)
Click to expand...

You know, I almost typed up the suggestion that he delay his late addition hops, however, then I thought about it for a few minutes. How is he going to know his SG is low, until he gets to the full 60 min? I supposed he could take samples and figure out how much the Gravity rises for every 15 min of boiling and then adjust accordingly, but I don't know how accurate that would be.

I would "assume" that he's followed the recipe as written, and then just wants to boil longer to get to the correct SG, which would mean that all hops that were going in already went into the BK. Any hops added in the last 5 minutes or so would be easy to delay, but any 15 min, 30min, etc... hop additions would be much harder to adjust, and would jsut get boiled even longer. If he could predict that his wort's gravity would be low at 60 min ahead of time, then he could easily adjust the hop schedule, including the bittering hops, although if he could predict that, he could also just add some DME/LME, or more grain to his mash, to increase the gravity to begin with which would eliminate the need for additional boiling.
 
dummkauf said:
You know, I almost typed up the suggestion that he delay his late addition hops, however, then I thought about it for a few minutes. How is he going to know his SG is low, until he gets to the full 60 min? I supposed he could take samples and figure out how much the Gravity rises for every 15 min of boiling and then adjust accordingly, but I don't know how accurate that would be.

I would "assume" that he's followed the recipe as written, and then just wants to boil longer to get to the correct SG, which would mean that all hops that were going in already went into the BK. Any hops added in the last 5 minutes or so would be easy to delay, but any 15 min, 30min, etc... hop additions would be much harder to adjust, and would jsut get boiled even longer. If he could predict that his wort's gravity would be low at 60 min ahead of time, then he could easily adjust the hop schedule, including the bittering hops, although if he could predict that, he could also just add some DME/LME, or more grain to his mash, to increase the gravity to begin with which would eliminate the need for additional boiling.
Click to expand...

Which is more or less what I wound up doing. The recipe was for a 'Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale' clone taken from Beer Captured. I brewed the recipe the way the book said about a month ago. Only, this time I plugged everything into Beersmith. Normally, I wouldn't do a preboil check. I would only do them right before I pitched and at bottling.

I didn't notice the 'preboil check' on the BS instruction sheet until just after I added the intial hops. I took a small sample, cooled it and took a reading and that's when I noticed how off I was. The only thing that could account for it was the larger preboil volume. So, I posted the question. From there, I took samples every 15 minutes and just delayed my late hop addition until I felt I had correctly 'guesstimated' where BS said I should be.

I got fairly close. I wanted 1.053 and hit 1.048.
 
NCBeernut said:
Beersmith volume calculations are not very accurate in my experience. I always ignored them. I actually stopped using it completely when I got an iPhone. I found the BrewPal app to give me really accurate calculations for my system, so I just use that now.
Click to expand...

Beersmith calculations work perfect for me. That is, once I went through all the different equipment settings and told Beersmith exactly what my system will do. It took a couple brew days to really dial it in but now it works great.
 

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