centennial. Went pretty well, missed by 2 points. Sugar addition?

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nathan

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Howdy all, I just airlocked a centennial blonde from beirmuncher's recipe. I ended up with a 1.037 instead of 1.040, so maybe it'll be a light centennial blonde.

Should I consider a 4 to 8 ounce addition of table sugar (boiled of course) to bump it? The only DME I have in the house is wheat. I have 5.6 gallons in the carboy.

Or should I just suck it up and enjoy the lighter blonde?
 
btw, tomorrow I brew a hefeweizen. Both of these batches are due in 10 days to be kegged and force carb'd for a trip to my brother's for a barbeque in 2 weeks.
 
Howdy all, I just airlocked a centennial blonde from beirmuncher's recipe. I ended up with a 1.037 instead of 1.040, so maybe it'll be a light centennial blonde.

Should I consider a 4 to 8 ounce addition of table sugar (boiled of course) to bump it? The only DME I have in the house is wheat. I have 5.6 gallons in the carboy.

Or should I just suck it up and enjoy the lighter blonde?

I wouldn't mess with it. Thats such a small difference it wouldn't even be noticeable.

Did you do any temp correction for your hydrometer? If your sample was at 70 then you would have gotten 1.038, if it was at 80F then it would have been 1.039
 
Thanks guys. I have obeyed orders and pulled a hefeweizen from tap #1!

I do temp adjust my readings. I actually write them all down when I take them, with their temps and readings, then use beer smith when I get a moment to do the calculations for temp. It does mean that I'm usually too late to just dump in some DME (even if I had some light dme) to adjust, as it's often in the carboy by the time I have a moment. I was setting up the workstation at 8:30a.m. and stacking the last wet-but-clean dishes/utensils at 2:30a.m., so that was a relatively short session for an AG.

Tomorrow I do a decoction on the hefe, but I need to rework it. I had read of others using a decoction to reach mash-out temp of 170F. I discussed this with one of the former brewers of Molson, and after he pondered it he recommended decocting to a lower temp and giving it 15 minutes or so. His thought was that any steely ends or starches that might have still been undissolved and liberated by the decoction could use the enzymatic activity back in the mash. If your malt had a lot starch from this, you could end up with haze. Clearly more of an issue for a large brewery, but cool that he would discuss it with me. He also gave me some information about the power requirements for decoctions which really illuminate why it is a dying art at the professional scale. It's a minimum of 3 times the energy of a normal mega-brewery mash for them to do it.

I'll drop this into it's own thread so it can be hashed out a bit.
 
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