Adding water pre-boil

[TLR]

Ok, so here's my situation. I had planned on doing my first lager next week and went to my LHBS to pick up some grain. I asked for extra of each malt because I was going to weigh and crush myself. Anyway, guy comes out with a 15lbs of mixed grain in one bag.

On top of that, this weekend I used my new barley crusher for the first time and my efficiency went from 69% to 81%. So now I'm really screwed with this lager because if I mash all 15lbs my preboil gravity is going to be way high. Is it okay to just remove x amount of wort and add back water? I know it is but it will probably be a few gallons.

So basically I want a preboil of 1.037 with 8.25gallons for a 90 min boil. What my software is saying with the new efficiency and extra grain I'll be at 1.052 with 8.25 gallons. Suggestions? Thanks!

 

[Hello]

Hmm I'd worry about the beer being oddly thin. I also wouldn't have accepted the grain unless you didn't make it clear to him that you didn't want it all mixed.

I guess you can try your idea or lower your pre boil volume and boil time. Maybe?

 

[TLR]

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. I'll give it a shot with adding water. Don't want to waste the grain. Thanks

 

[chickypad]

Just adjust your whole grainbill down to account for your new efficiency. A 1.037 beer has 71% the gravity pts of a 1.052 beer. So reduce your grainbill to 71% it's original: 15lb x .71 = 10.67 lbs grain.

Another way to think of it would be to say that for this recipe you are getting 28.6 gravity pts per lb of grain (52 x 8.25 / 15 = 28.6). You want 37 x 8.25 or 305 pts. 305/28.6 = 10.66 lb grain.

Any time you brew you'll need adjust the original recipe to the efficiency and volumes for your own system.

 

[TLR]

Thanks chickypad, I understand that and I know it would work. My thought is that because I have 4 different types of grains all mixed into one 15lb bag, I can't be sure I'm getting the correct % of the grain for the bill.

So like you said if I take out aprox 4.5lbs from the mash. I won't know if I just removed 10% of my Vienna or maybe 50%. I guess if the bag was well mixed it may average out. Does that make any sense?

 

[chickypad]

I'm sure if you stir the grains really well it will be fine. Remove some wort and dilute if you feel more comfortable, though if you do it pre-boil you also may run into a mixing issue assuming you sparged and will therefore have some stratification of the wort. Just seems like a waste to me, unless you're going to use that 2+ gallons of wort for a small batch. I take it your kettle isn't large enough to do a bigger batch?

 

[copper2hopper]

Resurected, need advice....

I was having issues with my pre boil gravity cuz I was getting crazy awesome conversion efficiency and was at a 1.045 with 15 minutes of mash time still left. Probably because I could afford to go really really fine with my crush since I was doing BIAB. So to compensate I added another 1.5 gallons to my initial 7 I struck with. I figured "cool more free wort to make this a 6 gallon instead of 5 gallon batch". So that knocked it down to 1.041 preboil at 8 gallons after the squeeze post mash. I still over shot the target 1.047 and ended at 1.051 OG but got a solid 6 into the fermenter with probably another 1/2 gallon left in the BK. My hop additions were to the T so I just hope this turns out ok with all that extra watering down I had to do so I wouldn't drastically overshoot the OG.

Is this ok? I didn't remove wort and then replace it with equal amounts of water like the OP since I wasn't concerned about volume and I had plenty of room in my BK

 

[chickypad]

If you were doing a 60 min mash then likely the conversion was already done when added you extra water. What you did is fine, it's sort of like a mash out although that's done with hot water for the purpose of raising the temp of the whole grainbill (not needed with BIAB). Basically you just made a bigger batch - i.e. went from 5 to 6.5. When you say your hops were to the T, do you mean you adjusted them for the larger batch size? If not you would have lowered your IBU's a little. If you keep good notes you can adjust your recipe next time to hit your actual efficiency.

 

[copper2hopper]

I thought about that dangit and shoulda compensated my hop additions for the added water volume but did not. Thank you for your reply