My worst brew day so far.

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B33R

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I just got done brewing my 4th batch ever. My first 3 went very well. Today not so much. Missed my mash temp by 2ºF was aiming for 154 got 152. First time i've missed my mash temp. I collect my boil volume of 6.75 Gallons. When my boil is finished I'm looking at it like WOW thats not 5 gallons. Sure enough my 60 minute boil got me down to 4 gallons. So i had 2.75 gallons of boil off. WTF? Also my target gravity was 1.057. Even with all that boil off i only got 1.061. I only got 64% efficiency. Most of my beers have been 76-78 range.

So not only did i have crazy boil off i had about a 12% decrease in efficiency. I am confused by that. I figure out I do get about 1.25 to 1.5 gallons of boil off during the normal 60 minute boil or that has been my average. I'm just confused about this crazy amount of boil off and terrible efficiency.
 
Believe me, it could be much worse. You still have beer. I've seen several people on here talk about a bad brew day experience that ended with a major spill, broken carboy etc.
Chalk this up as a lesson learned, and make a great next batch.
 
Yeah, that's not too bad. I've had worse and heard of worse and mine still turned out pretty damn good. Missing your mash by 2 won't kill your beer and some people don't even worry about their efficiency and instead just focus on consistency of their techniques. I've definitely missed my OGs by more and once again.......it was a great beer!

RDWHAHB brother :mug:
 
Yeah i know 2º isn't the end of the world. I just don't get why i had such a large amount of boil off with this one. I think I'm more or less puzzled by this then anything else.
 
Were you brewing outside? I find that cold, windy weather can greatly increase my boil-off.
 
Mash temp within 2 degrees, OG 4 points higher than expected, beer at the end of the process.....

Sounds like a fine day to me!:mug:
 
That's brew day with a few hiccups. I got all the way through a perfect mash,boil, into a good chill on my deck on a beautiful fall day, only to realize way too late that a hose clamp on my immersion chiller gave way and filled what should have been a 5gal batch up to 12gal. I. Tryed fermenting it out anyways but had no action at all. First and only dumped batch!!!
 
That's brew day with a few hiccups. I got all the way through a perfect mash,boil, into a good chill on my deck on a beautiful fall day, only to realize way too late that a hose clamp on my immersion chiller gave way and filled what should have been a 5gal batch up to 12gal. I. Tryed fermenting it out anyways but had no action at all. First and only dumped batch!!!

Out of sheer curiosity...anyone know what would have happened had he reboiled it down?

Granted we are looking at a 3,5 maybe 7+ hour boil (depending on boiloff)...but curious if it would have worked.
 
I thought about that too jay and just didn't add it to the story the SG was very very low. After I weighed out the cost of propane vs how much I spent on the batch, it was worth it to eat the batch cost and live to brew another day.
 
It'll probably be your favorite beer so far. I think it's too easy to get caught up in all the numbers - I do it, too. It's tough getting everything to exactly where it's supposed to be.

In fact, last weekend, i had taken a sample to do a gravity reading to see if we needed to extend the boil. When i finally came back outside my brewing buddy had already put out the flame and had been chilling the wort! It had dropped by 20F by the time I got back outside! Oh well, come to find out our OG for our Imperial Stout hit over 1.100.

But even the beers that i totally missed my target OG on and the ones where I end up with 4 gallons, they're still really good.

The only batch that was truly crappy was the one that fermented waaaay too hot. It's just now starting to lose that banana pudding taste.
 
I just got done brewing my 4th batch ever. My first 3 went very well. Today not so much. Missed my mash temp by 2ºF was aiming for 154 got 152. First time i've missed my mash temp. I collect my boil volume of 6.75 Gallons. When my boil is finished I'm looking at it like WOW thats not 5 gallons. Sure enough my 60 minute boil got me down to 4 gallons. So i had 2.75 gallons of boil off. WTF? Also my target gravity was 1.057. Even with all that boil off i only got 1.061. I only got 64% efficiency. Most of my beers have been 76-78 range.

So not only did i have crazy boil off i had about a 12% decrease in efficiency. I am confused by that. I figure out I do get about 1.25 to 1.5 gallons of boil off during the normal 60 minute boil or that has been my average. I'm just confused about this crazy amount of boil off and terrible efficiency.


Are you sure you didn't mismeasure the initial runnings?

All these symptoms would make sens if you pulled, say, 5.75g instead of 6.75

(missed efficiency, lower final volume/higher boil rate)
 
2 degrees off your mash temp is nothing to worry about.

Also, over 2 gallon boil off is not hard to believe.

I brew outside in illinois. Temp on brew day was in the 20's. My last batch i started at 8.25 gallons and after a 60 minute boil i only had 5.5 gallons left.
 
It'll probably be your favorite beer so far. I think it's too easy to get caught up in all the numbers - I do it, too. It's tough getting everything to exactly where it's supposed to be.

I don't necessarily agree. If you know your system well enough, I find it very easy to make my calculations and get near exact results each time. This certainly wasn't the case for me when I was constantly making upgrades, but my last 5 batches have really allowed me to dial things in.
 
·Synovia, I'm pretty sure because i collect in a bucket with markings on it just to verify i have collected enough to reach my boil kettle volume. On my notes i Got 4.65 gallons and on my second running's collected 2.05 making a total of 6.7 gallons which was higher then the 6.4 gallons i was suppose to collect according to BeerToolsPro.

I was also brewing in my garage so the wind shouldn't have been the factor although the cold dry air might have.

I agree with DocRobinson, even though i'm a newb at brewing i've had pretty consistant results on all my other brews. Has a matter of fact i hit everything really close on my first brew ever.
 
Compared to my worst brew day, I say you did alright.

My worst brew day ever was two days ago. It was my sixth and seventh brew that I tried to tackle on one night. Both were not kits but recipes that I found here. On top of that, I had to scale down the recipe to 4 gallons.

One was Brandon O's Graff and the other was NCBeernut's Deception Stout.

I threw too much wheat DME and maltose into the stout brew kettle as I was concurrently aerating and pitching the Graff. The Graff turned out alright but the Deception Stout turned into an imperial milk stout. :tank:

To top it off, the stout blew off the stopper today and spewed it's guts out. I wound up pitching another 1 liter starter today, 48 hours into the fermentation, to account for the super high OG (1.096). One liter of starter for such a high gravity beer would have been severely underpitched.

So your missteps seem quite minor in comparison. :mug:
 
Several years ago, I became fixated on Pre-Prohibition Lager. Had to make one. After scouring all of the recipe data bases, I settled on Northern Brewer's partial mash kit. Brewed it up with no problem, fermented great, lagered it the appropriate length of time and bottled. Infected. No idea where it came from, but we've all been there. A year goes by, and I decide to try again with the same kit. I really wanted to make a beer that my grandfather would have enjoyed after a day working on the B&O Railroad. Took a vacation day from work, I wasn't going to be rushed this time. Everything went just great. Chilled the wort, poured it into the fermentor, came up about half a gallon short of the 5 gallon mark. Opened the refrigerator, grabbed the jug of water to top it off - and realized, too late, that the water jug I had grabbed was the milk jug. Four and a half gallons of wort, half a gallon of milk. :eek: A day and a batch of beer wasted. I've yet to make that Pre-Prohibition Lager.....:tank:
 
There are actually many factors that can, significantly or not, affect boil off. Temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, heat source, barometric pressure, and altitude relative to sea level all can have an effect on how liquids boil.

The important thing to remember is you still got beer out of it. That always makes for a good day!
 
Yeah i know 2º isn't the end of the world. I just don't get why i had such a large amount of boil off with this one. I think I'm more or less puzzled by this then anything else.

I was trying to figure that out on my last brew as well. I was doing a partial boil but I still ended up with a lot more boil off than I expected.
 
Man this thread is old but I have to say that I have a hard time with mash temps every brew day. My beer is always good any way,
 
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