First AG, mostly good, some bad

My buddy and I did our first all grain batch together yesterday. Everything went well up to the end. We did sparge a bit too much water, which brought our OG down a bit. That was due to my buddy not measuring the water level in his kettle and having clear markings on his spoon... lesson learned. We hit our mash temp and we successfully got through the boil on our 10 gallon batch. However, as the wort was chilling on the patio it was sprinkling outside. No big deal, I was under the covered patio. All of the sudden my buddy is inside and I'm tending the chiller and wort colored gutter water starts dripping outside the gutter straight into our wort. I deflected it the best I could, but we definitely got a small amount of nasty gutter water in the almost cooled wort. I'll be amazed if it doesn't get an infection of some sort.

After brewing with my buddy I realized he's not nearly as careful about detail or sanitization as I am. He was putting unsanitized thermometers in the wort while it was cooling and didn't seem to flinch about the gutter water. We learned a lot of lessons in our first AG attempt and the cost difference alone means I won't go back to extract unless I have to.

On the other hand, they made beer for thousands of years before anyone sanitized anything. Gutter water is kind of gross though.

That doesn't sound too appetizing. Unfortunately, your finished product may not turn out too good due to the gutter water. But, wait until you taste the difference between a successful AG brew and an ordinary extract brew. The difference is astounding.

Pay attention to your boil off rate. I have a wider kettle and when it's windy or cold I lose about 1.5g/hr. If I sparged off half a gallon too much I'd boil it for 20 minutes to evaporate the extra water, then start my 60 minute boil timer. That should solve that problem.

I did the same thing before and it was pouring rain, and pitch black out to boot. We had to end up boiling for 90 mins instead of 60 to get the volume down. Turned out to be an awesome beer.

I'm pretty careful about sanitation and after 35 batches or so I've never had an infection. That being said I've had unsanitized stuff accidentally drop into the wort, airlocks blown off leaving the carboy open for days, forgot to sanitize the thermometer a few times, forgot to sanitize a spoon once. There's a thread on hear about brewing mistakes where the batch turned out great. You wouldn't believe the things that have been dropped in wort and no problems came from it. Cell phones, gloves, etc.. One dude spilled his yeast and ended up scraping it into the carboy.

I don't think you'll have any problems. Still though people are going to drink it, so do your best to be as sanitary as possible.

Oh and honestly gutter water sounds gross, but I'm going to be it won't impact your beer at all, flavor or otherwise. If might end up being the best brew ever, and you'll try to figure out how to add a little gutter water to each batch.

Too late now, but if it happens again, you could re-boil the wort just to kill the bad stuff. Takes some time, but it would work.

MacGruber said:

But, wait until you taste the difference between a successful AG brew and an ordinary extract brew. The difference is astounding.

Click to expand...

Fermentation took off in less than 24 hours so I'm hoping the yeast colony overwhelmed any nasties from the gutter water. I would guess I got less than 2 tablespoons of gutter water in the beer, definitely not enough to have any impact on flavor by itself. The question is what type of wild yeast/bacteria made it in. It was a steady drip and I deflected most of it with my hands until my buddy came out to help me move the 100lb kettle. If it turns out OK then I will add it to the thread about worst things that have happened to your beer and it turned out OK.

Thanks for the tips about volume. My buddy and I were running into a time crunch at the end or I would have boiled again. We did a mash out double sparge and after including the lost volume in the kettle and overshooting the total volume our efficiency was around 70%.

That leads to another question, there was a TON of "stuff" on the bottom of the kettle that caused us to leave behind about 1/2 gallon of our 10 gallon batch. Kind of looked like 1/4 inch off-white shreds of material. I assumed it was the cold break, is that what it looks like? I've never seen that much material left in the kettle. Do you want to leave that behind or can it go into the fermenter?

It sounds like cold break to me.