I'm a longtime all grain brewer. I've been faithfully listening to Jamil Z over the years. One of the things he advocates is for AG brewers to occasionally dip back into our extract roots, employing the sanitation, yeast starter and temp control tricks we've picked up along the way. He claims we'd be surprised at how good the beer turns out.
So at lunch, I went to my LHBS and picked up the Brewcraft Dry Stout Kit and a tube of WLP004. My plan is to brew the kit per instructions, with my only change being that I plan to do a full wort boil vs. a small extract boil then topping up in the fermenter.
I broke out the instructions when I got back and decided to run the ingredients through a spreadsheet I made, just so I can account for pre and post boil. I was mainly doing this to see if the IBUs are going to be off wildly from what the kit claims (Since I was changing the boil volume). But when the pre-boil and post boil numbers jumped back at me based on the ingredients in the kit, I got a little worried.
The kit claims an OG for 5 gallons of 1.053. Here's what's included in the kit:
Steeping Grains:
.75# Roasted Barley
.25# Black Malt
.25# Chocolate Malt
.5# Crystal 75
Extract-
1# Briess Dark DME
3# Briess Pilsen DME
When I run that through my spreadsheet assuming a starting kettle volume of 7 gallons and a finishing volume of 5.5 gallons (to account for trub), I get 1.038 (assuming 70% on the steeping grains, which I probably won't get if I just do a steep).
Even if I drop my final kettle volume to 5 gallons, it still only gets me to 1.042 (My spreadsheet accounts for 44 points per pound per gallon on dried extracts).
Trying to determine whether my spreadsheet was broken, I ran the same fermentables above through the online calculator at brewersfriend.com. Using the same starting and finishing volumes, I get the same numbers (1.038 and 1.042).
So what gives? Is there some magical calculation that I am missing, or is this kit really just shy by about 10-14 points on fermentables?
I've got a new 3# bag of amber DME sitting around that I usually reserve for making starters. It looks like adding 2# of it to this recipe should put me at the numbers I am looking for (1.051-53 is what I get when I plug it in and account for 5.5 gallons at the end of boil).
It just seems odd to me that a kit would be this far off in terms of fermentables. But those amounts are exactly what's printed on the instruction sheet. So I guess that's what they intended to put in.
So at lunch, I went to my LHBS and picked up the Brewcraft Dry Stout Kit and a tube of WLP004. My plan is to brew the kit per instructions, with my only change being that I plan to do a full wort boil vs. a small extract boil then topping up in the fermenter.
I broke out the instructions when I got back and decided to run the ingredients through a spreadsheet I made, just so I can account for pre and post boil. I was mainly doing this to see if the IBUs are going to be off wildly from what the kit claims (Since I was changing the boil volume). But when the pre-boil and post boil numbers jumped back at me based on the ingredients in the kit, I got a little worried.
The kit claims an OG for 5 gallons of 1.053. Here's what's included in the kit:
Steeping Grains:
.75# Roasted Barley
.25# Black Malt
.25# Chocolate Malt
.5# Crystal 75
Extract-
1# Briess Dark DME
3# Briess Pilsen DME
When I run that through my spreadsheet assuming a starting kettle volume of 7 gallons and a finishing volume of 5.5 gallons (to account for trub), I get 1.038 (assuming 70% on the steeping grains, which I probably won't get if I just do a steep).
Even if I drop my final kettle volume to 5 gallons, it still only gets me to 1.042 (My spreadsheet accounts for 44 points per pound per gallon on dried extracts).
Trying to determine whether my spreadsheet was broken, I ran the same fermentables above through the online calculator at brewersfriend.com. Using the same starting and finishing volumes, I get the same numbers (1.038 and 1.042).
So what gives? Is there some magical calculation that I am missing, or is this kit really just shy by about 10-14 points on fermentables?
I've got a new 3# bag of amber DME sitting around that I usually reserve for making starters. It looks like adding 2# of it to this recipe should put me at the numbers I am looking for (1.051-53 is what I get when I plug it in and account for 5.5 gallons at the end of boil).
It just seems odd to me that a kit would be this far off in terms of fermentables. But those amounts are exactly what's printed on the instruction sheet. So I guess that's what they intended to put in.
