Extremely low gravity beers - anyone has experience brewing them ?

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did a wheat last night and ran a partigyle through to see what i could get... wound up with a 90 min post boil gravity of 1.016. uh... way too small. pitched yeast for giggles and grins, but i'm guessing this is gonna get dumped.

somehow a 1.5% abv second running of a wheat does not seem appetizing. lol.
 
did a wheat last night and ran a partigyle through to see what i could get... wound up with a 90 min post boil gravity of 1.016. uh... way too small. pitched yeast for giggles and grins, but i'm guessing this is gonna get dumped.

somehow a 1.5% abv second running of a wheat does not seem appetizing. lol.
And these are the times you kick yourself for not having any extra light DME laying around. I try to always have a 3lb bag - just in case.
 
Ive never done anything below 4.5%. But I know the one huge issue with low ABV beers is that if anything goes off you are going to taste it. Just no room to hide any off flavors!
 
And these are the times you kick yourself for not having any extra light DME laying around. I try to always have a 3lb bag - just in case.

i did have some, but i was kind of focused on my primary batch and figured i'd just let it roll for 90 minutes and see what i got... not sure i'm comfortable drinking a 1.5% abv beer... seems kind of risky and tasteless to me.
 
Checking final gravity tomorrow, racking to keg and starting to force carb my Dark Flat Cap Mild which should weigh in at 3.4-3.8% abv. May try the set & forget method this time and check back on it in two weeks. I've been impatient with the last several, but I've found everything tastes better a few weeks in anyway...
 
Bumping this old thread up to keep the ideas coming. I'm oncall for 1-2 weeks every month and having 1 pint at most really puts a damper on the hobby. Thinking I may do a few 3G batches in the 2.5-3.5% range. Jamil's Dark Mild may be my starting point, but I think I want something a little more roasty.
 
Brewing this half-batch right now. Been awhile since I've brewed on the stove top.

mildwookieerecipe.jpg
 
I am about to keg a mild.

5# Crisp Marris Otter
1# English Crystal 60
6oz Thomas Fawcett Chocolate Malt

.75 Fuggle at 60
.75 Fuggle at 10

Nottingham Yeast

5.5 Gallons
1.033 OG
1.008 FG
19 IBU
3.3% ABV
 
The problem I can see with a longer boil is that you need a bigger starting volume and my setup's boil rate hovers around 13-15%. A bigger starting volume can mean a lesser gravity starting wort or bigger final efficiency. In normal/big beers, that's not a problem, since you're not likely to be extracting tannins by sparging a gallon or two more. But with something that FINISHES at 1.028 after the boil, I'd be worried that the final runnings might dip very, very low.
A solution could be to just add water to the wort before the boil. That's what they used to do with many low-gravity beers.

Of course, they'd usually be parti-gyling with the 1028 beer as the weakest of two or three.
 
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