Am I the worst homebrewer?

[pmcint01]

Been homebrewing for a year and half. All grain after a few extracts to start off the hobby. I seem to regularly miss my target gravities by a a double digit margin most of the time. I don't know why. I mash in a rectangular cooler and have trouble hitting my mash temp dead on about half the time.

Yesterday i tried brewing a Hair of the Dog Adam Clone recipe and had my worst results yet. The target Pre-Boil Gravity was 1.066, mine was 1.054. A 3 hour boil was supposed to yield and OG of 1.022. I boiled off nearly 6 gallons in that time and only made it up to 1.066.

What am I missing here. Do I have bad equipment? (Refractometer) How can my gravity have only increased so little with that much of a boil?

This is the version of the recipe I followed:

6 gallon batch size
Est. OG 1.122
Est. FG 1.030


21 lb 9.9 oz Pale Malt (2 row)
2 lb 7.3 oz Caramel/Cyrstal Malt 40L
2 lb 2.6 oz Munich 10 L
13.8 oz Peat Smoked Malt
11.2 Chocolate Malt
5.6 oz Black Patent
Scottish Ale Yeast Wyeast 1728

 

[Gavin C]

Seems like it is often a bad crush or too low a mash temperature that's the key in these instances. Post a pic of your crush and more knowledgeable folks than I can impart their wisdom.

How are you calculating strike water temps? Perhaps the use of some brewing software may be in order if you are that far out regularly. How are you monitoring and maintaining mash temps?

These a 3 key areas that I have focused upon myself and my brewhouse efficiency is now consistent at 74-75 with BIAB.

Hopefully this is not all redundant information. I have never attempted such big beers nor a 3 hour boil. I stick with Og's of 1.04 to 1.07. (biggest so far was 1.064)

 

[BigEd]

What am I missing here.

I don't know but 28 lbs of grain in a six gallon recipe is insane. That's about twice as much as should be required to hit a beer in that target gravity.

The first things to look at:

Milling; The malts should be finely crushed. It's probably the #1 cause of poor conversion efficiency with homebrewing.

Temperature: Is your thermometer accurate? Have you tested it? Are you stirring/mixing the mash thoroughly to establish a uniform mash?

Sparge/Runoff: Are you leaving a lot of sugar behind? The leftover grain after mashing should taste almost like sawdust, indicating all the sugar is in your wort.

 

[Gavin C]

28lbs is crazy but for an OG of 1.122 would that be close to the mark? I'm way out of my depth here. 10-14lbs is about what I work with

 

[JR_Brewer]

First off, are you correcting for temperature when you're taking gravity readings, aren't you?

Assuming you are, could you clarify some things? After the mash/sparge, you had 12 gallons or wort at 1.054? Then, after the boil you had 6 gallons at 1.066? And there were no additions of sugars or water in between, right? Only boil-off?

 

[jdauria]

Some questions on your process. Do you batch sparge or fly sparge? If fly, how fast are you running off the wort? Too fast and you will not get all the sugars. If batch, are you stirring after adding the sparge water? Are you stirring the mash a few times during the mash rest. Do you use a mash out?

Have you checked your thermometer to see if it is accurate? If it's off that can hurt your gravity too. Boil water and see if you hit 212F (adjusted for your location if above sea level). Also test it in ice water to see if you hit 32 degrees.

Thermometer off and grain crush are the first two things I would look at. Next I would look at your water. Do you use your local water? Have you had it tested or have a water report? Your pH of the wort is also an important factor and you may need to adjust your water with brewing salts.

After that, I would question your brewing liquid volumes. What is your hourly boil off rate? Are you not boiling off enough? Though looking at your last brew, you had 1.054 preboil and only 1.066 AFTER three hours of boiling? That does not make sense. Usually for an hour boil off my gravity increases around 10 points. Do you have a nice rolling boil? Stove top or propane burner?

Putting 12 gallons, 1.054 preboil gravity, 3 hr (6 gallon) boil off in BeerSmith tells me I should wind up with 1.113 OG.

So besides all the other items I touched out...calibrate your refractometer with distilled water. Make sure it reads zero with distilled water. Does it have both Brix and gravity readings? If so, stop using the gravity numbers as most refractometers gravity numbers are off. Use the Brix numbers and use an online calculator to convert to gravity points.

Hope this helps!

 

[BeerGrylls]

There's no freakin' way that you boiled a 1.054 wort for three hours and ended up at 1.066. Something is wrong with your measurement methodology.

For this recipe, if you truly had 12 gallons to start with and a 2 gal / hour boil-off rate to end up with 6, then yes 28# would be around 1.066 at 75% efficiency. I'm assuming you meant 1.122 post-boil gravity. How are you using that refractometer? There is a specific way to use it.

 

[atoughram]

I don't know but 28 lbs of grain in a six gallon recipe is insane.

Temperature: Is your thermometer accurate? Have you tested it?

Sparge/Runoff: Are you leaving a lot of sugar behind? The leftover grain after mashing should taste almost like sawdust, indicating all the sugar is in your wort.

I had to bust my calculator out.... holy smokes...

What is your grist ratio?? 1qt/1lb?

Boil some water in your microwave, your thermometer should read 212f anywhere near sea level.

Forget the refractometer, they are nice for a quick check (First and last runnings, etc), but use a hydrometer to get the OG. Good ones are still fairly cheap.

 

[TasunkaWitko]

Fundamentals matter.

 

[pmcint01]

Thanks for the replies guys. I'll try to answer the various questions:

I use Beersmith to calculate my strike water temps. It tells me that I need to be about 12 degrees above my mash and sometimes that has worked and other times it hasn't. Was about 10 degrees low this time. I also preheat the cooler mashtun with boiling water.

I have a temp probe that I can leave in the cooler during the mash and the tun usually loses no more than 1 degree/hour.

I thought that I had a decent crush. I've crushed a friends grains a few times and he had great results. Posted a sample pic on here a few months back and peoples said it looked good.

The thermometer I was using for strike water is not that good and I discovered it might be 3-4 degree low compared to my Thermapen. So this probably contributed to missing my mash temp low. I do stir the mash very well before I close the cooler. I did not stire the mash during the mash rest as I was afraid of losing heat doing so.

I batch sparged half of 9 gallons two times and I think I got all of the sugars out, but I don't know for sure. I stirred very well when I added each sparge water addition.

I'm using a cheaper Refractometer from ebay and I let the wort cool to about 70 degrees before I take a reading.

Pre-Boil I had nearly 14 gallons in the kettle at 1.054. Post was just under 8 gallons and gravity was 1.066. There were no sugar or water additions only boil off.

I use distilled water and add all my salts per the Bru'n water spreadsheet.
My boil off rates are 2 gal/hr. Using an outdoor burner. I don't think I have a super big boil, but I could clearly see the steam of the liquid evaporation.

I am really wondering if some piece of equipment is failing me because it should not make sense.

I take a small amount of wort for the gravity sample and let it cool in its own dish to room temp. Drop a few drops onto the refractometer with the dropper, close cover and hold up to light to take a reading. Maybe I should just use a Hydrometer.

 

[Yooper]

I batch sparged half of 9 gallons two times and I think I got all of the sugars out, but I don't know for sure. I stirred very well when I added each sparge water addition.

I am trying to imaging using 4.5 gallons of sparge water in 28 pounds of grain. I don't think you'd even be able to stir that, it would be so thick. Did you only use half of the water because it all wouldn't fit in your MLT? The key to batch sparging is very thorough stirring- stirring it like it owes you money- and I don't think you'd be able to mix 4.5 gallons of liquid in that much grain so that could be a huge issue right there.

How much water did you use in the mash?

 

[Homercidal]

Could be a number of things. Inaccurate thermometer for one.

Also, I like to strike in a bit higher than Beersmith says. It's WAY easier to drop some ice cubes in the mash to cool it down than it is to heat UP a mash!

Also make sure you are checking your gravity with the wort at the proper temp. A refractometer also needs to be calibrated sometimes each time.

 

[JR_Brewer]

I'm using a cheaper Refractometer from ebay and I let the wort cool to about 70 degrees before I take a reading.

Pre-Boil I had nearly 14 gallons in the kettle at 1.054. Post was just under 8 gallons and gravity was 1.066. There were no sugar or water additions only boil off.

...

I take a small amount of wort for the gravity sample and let it cool in its own dish to room temp. Drop a few drops onto the refractometer with the dropper, close cover and hold up to light to take a reading. Maybe I should just use a Hydrometer.

Ok, thanks for the clarification. There's clearly a problem with the measurement of gravity. Either you are taking a sample that's not representative of the rest of the wort, or the refractometer is way off. Recommend using a hydrometer next time you brew (do it in addition to your refractometer). Then, if you're still having problems, come back here.

Good news is that it will be beer. Good luck, and hope you can quickly isolate this problem! Cheers

 

[feinbera]

You also shouldn't be afraid to just add a little 2-row to a recipe, if you're consistently coming up under gravity.

Get a hydrometer, those numbers are indeed wonky, but once you're getting measurements you can believe, you should be able to calculate the actual efficiency you're getting, and tweak your recipes so they hit the right gravity taking your anticipated efficiency (rather than whatever generic efficiency number the recipe's maker used) into account. 2-row is cheap, and while some folks may well get 90% every brew BIAB'ing with an old pair of their gramma's bloomers in their grade school fishbowl heated to strike temp just by staring at it real hard, getting more than mediocre efficiency is tough for a lot of brewers, and there's nothing wrong with working around it.

 

[cernst151]

I'd try to crush finer if you can. Double crush if you're crushing at the store. Probably the biggest issue I see is your mash thickness. It's not entirely clear but with that much grain you'd need a very large mash tun. What's your mash thickness ratio, quarts to lbs? I did a very large IIPA a while back but didn't have enough space for a proper ratio and came out well under my target gravity.

 

[poptarts]

Pre-Boil I had nearly 14 gallons in the kettle at 1.054. Post was just under 8 gallons and gravity was 1.066. There were no sugar or water additions only boil off.

This is not possible. 14/8 = 1.75 * 1.054 = 1.0945 OG

one of your measurements is way off.

 

[boydster]

Right away, the refractometer readings jump out as looking suspect to me. If you boiled off 1/3 of your water, your gravity could not possibly have only jumped from 1.054 to 1.066. Something is wrong with those readings, as you should have ended up at 1.081 mathematically and the sugar doesn't just boil away. Given that the post-boil reading doesn't make any sense, it also makes it hard to trust the pre-boil gravity figure. I'd try calibrating it, then test it with distilled water (to ensure you get a 0 reading) and water with a known amount of sugar dissolved into it (sanity check to make sure it comes up with the right gravity). If that doesn't work, toss it and get a new one or get a hydrometer. Yooper's post about using 4.5 gallons of sparge water with 28 lbs of grain is spot on, too. You need the grain to be loose enough to allow you to stir pretty vigorously and get it all to mix around, and it sounds like it would be way to stiff of a mixture with only 4.5 gallons of sparge water.

Are you the worst home brewer? Absolutely not! You're here trying to troubleshoot an issue and find a solution, right? Clearly you take your craft seriously. You'll get this figured out.

Edit: I did my math on 12 gallons boiled down to 8. Poptarts' maths are right based on 14 gallons.

 

[BrotherBock]

I used to miss my mash temp all the time. Now I purposely overshoot everytime (partly to compensate for the initial temp absorption by my mashtun). You're not gonna hurt anything by having a mash temp of 158 for a few minutes when you wanted 152. Its SO much easier to cool a mash down than bring the temp up (at least if you're mashing in a cooler like me). Just add a little ice cold water and/or stir for a while until you hit the temp you want.

 

[eric19312]

This is not possible. 14/8 = 1.75 * 1.054 = 1.0945 OG

one of your measurements is way off.

+1

one or both of your gravity measurements was wrong. by a lot.

Suggestions for getting better at measuring gravity:
- Stir the kettle well before collecting the gravity sample
- Get your pre-boil gravity after all your wort is collected and combined into the same kettle
- Use both the refractometer and hydrometer till you consistently get results that are comparable to each other.

I measure preboil and OG with refractometer and measure OG and FG with hydrometer. With preboil gravity from the refractometer I calculate efficiency and sometimes make an adjustment in my brew plan. Getting that quick read from the refractometer is really helpful. But I know I am going to use hydrometer to measure FG so I also get a hydrometer reading of my OG so I can trust my ABV calculation.

 

[PlinyTheMiddleAged]

pmcint01,

Are you sure that you are reading your refractometer correctly? Are you sure you have a gravity scale? If you place a few drops of water on the glass, what exactly do you see when you look in to the eyepiece? Do you see 1.000 or do you see 0 where the blue area crosses the scale?

Those numbers that you provided (as many others have stated) simply do not make sense.

 

[jdauria]

Make sure when taking a sample for your preboil reading that you stir the wort to blend it well as the late runnings will be a weaker gravity than what you originally ran off. Though even if well blended if your refractometer is off, that will not help.