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elktaker

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So this is my second attempt at brewing. My first attempt was incredible! The pale ale all DME kit has caused me not to enjoy commercially bottled beer as I was able to do before.
Now a good friend that has been brewing for a couple of years, gifted me a British Pub Porter from BWC Woodland Hills. His experience is "best homebrew I have ever had". His experience was justification for my second brew.
So, having one brew (in my opinion) that was great, I decided to make it better. Ten gallon SS pot, new DIY 1/2 inch copper wort cooler and new big burner.
Put the copper wort cooler in the wort and killed the boil. No problem, give some more heat and walk away while it comes back to boil. Return to my first boil over. Mistake one.
Flame out and now to cool the wort. Dropped from boil to 85 degrees in approximately five minutes. Just as planned. Now for mistake two. From 85 to 73 in about thirty minutes. New wort cooler is "Type L copper". I think the thick copper doesn't allow for correct heat transfer.
When I transfer from the pot to my 6.5 gallon carboy I immediately observe that my wort has dissipated to about 3.0-3.5 gallons. Disappointed but trudging on I blythely pitch my yeast and just chalk it up to a failure.
This morning I come up with the brilliant idea of just adding more water to the fermenter. Which I did.
Question: Is this brew worth saving or should I wait it out to see if it actually will come around to something I would drink or use for paint thinner?
Specs on the recipe:
Brew in bags with steeping grains
2 pounds (?) DME
.61 oz Target at 60 minutes
.20 oz Challenger at 20 minutes
Irish Moss at 20 minutes
TIA for any info.
 
If 2 lbs of DME were your only fermentables... you're going to have something with VERY little alcohol, assuming a 5 gal batch.
 
5 lbs to 5.5 gals would have an OG of around 1.038.

My guess is that you didn't account for boil off, so you put 5 gal in the kettle, probably boiled off 1.5 gal over the hour, plus whatever spilled out during the boil over.

How long before you noticed it was boiling over? Was there quite a bit of liquid on the ground?
 
Bookmark this:

http://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/calculator

Totally free if you don't mind never saving recipes there. I just write them up in a notebook from there.

IF you can get it to attenuate out to 1.01, you're looking at 3.75%, if you had not topped off, it would be pushing 6%. Since it's extract, it probably won't ferment out to 1.01, probably closer to 1.02. Bright side, you'll have more beer, downside, it'll be weak and thin. Still beer though.
 
First thought...

Nowhere near enough DME!

First question....

How much water did you start with and did you do a boil-off test to see how much you would lose during 60 minutes of boil?

To give you a better idea of where I'm coming from, when I make a 2 liter starter I use 1/2 pound of DME to give me a 1.024 starter wort. Using that as an example, your 2 pounds of DME diluted into roughly 12 liters would be between 1.018 and 1.030 starting gravity. Left alone may result in a very low ABV of about 1.8% to 2.2%. Since you state that you added additional water after the fact, you have diluted your wort to little more than a very large starter that will be disappointing as a beer.

On the brighter side of the coin, you have a very low gravity starter for growing your yeast. I would suggest that you give your fermenter a shake every few hours and plan to rebrew using the yeast. If you are able to cold crash your fermenter in 2 days, the decant the liquid on Saturday, you should have plenty of yeast cells to brew a nice 6% to 7% beer.
 
I think the boil over was finished when I noticed how high the liquid/foam was in my pot. Don't know exactly how much ended up being absorbed into the old piece of plywood I had protecting my deck.
 
Did you or can you take a gravity measurement? That's your original gravity (OG). That tells you how strong or weak of a beer you may end up with.

Have you pitched yeast yet? What kind, name?

You need to keep the fermentor in a cool place (60-65F) for the first week (or longer) to prevent making rocket fuel.
 
I did not do a "boil off" to ascertain my loss. Mistake three.
There was about 1.5 pounds of steeping grain.
I did the steeping according to directions, sparged according to the directions, then transferred the wort to my boil pot added water to the five gallon marker and started the boil.
 
I did take a reading before I added the water. The OG reading was 1.090. I used Wyeast 1275 Thames Valley. Temperature of wort at pitch was 73 degrees. Current temperature is 69.
 
Do you know how much water you added and how much the original (@1.090) or current volume is?

You can estimate the volume in your carboy (3.14 * r^2 * h).

I would keep that brew a bit cooler. Perhaps stick it in a tub of cool water, then float a frozen bottle of water in it to keep it at 65F. 69F is a bit high, and it can be a few degrees higher inside the carboy, which doesn't make beer better.

Whatever was said here, boil off is really not all that important for extract brews. The gravity can easily be adjusted down by adding more water (higher volume). The gravity can be raised by adding more extract. That simple.
 
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Your chiller is fine. The last few degrees always take a while. You should be able to get within 15 degrees of your tap water in about 10 to15 minutes if you stir. If youre close to pitching temp you can coax it down lower but it can take a while. If you're 15 or more degrees, best thing is to just transfer to your fermenter and pitch your yeast in a few hours when it cools to pitching temp.
 
Actually did the math two days ago and here is what I have computed. Depending on the thickness of the glass in the carboy I have between 5.38 and 5.73 gallons of fermenting brew.
After adding the additional water to the carboy, the yeast started doing the chew at about 36 hours.
Have been able to keep the temperature, according to the stick on thermometer, between 60-64 degrees. I have plenty of bubble coming out of the blow off tube and a healthy (4-5 inches) of kraeusen.
Based on the fact that I had the boil over (unknown quantity of waste) and I added approximately two gallons of water to the wort after placing it in the fermenter, I have two questions:
1) How weak, watery or undrinkable is this beer going to be?
2) I added the additional water about sixteen hours after placing it in the fermenter. Pouring the water in agitated the wort. Will this additional aeration before the yeast really started working, give any "off" flavors or taste?
 
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