MetuchenBrewerNJ
Well-Known Member
Hello everyone,
So over the past week I've done my first 2 AG batches, and they did not go as well as I had hoped, so I was wondering if anyone could help me out a little bit. I did the brew in a bag and here's the summary of what I did:
Ingredients:
6 lbs 5 oz British pale Ale Malt
2 lbs 11 oz German Pilsner Malt
3.8 AAU Cascade (60 min) (.75 oz @ 5%)
3.8 AAU Cascade (30 min) (.75 oz @ 5%)
3.8 AAU Cascade (0 min) (.75 oz @ 5%)
.88 oz Amarillo (Dry Hop)
Nottingham Ale Yeast (WLP005 English Ale Yeast)
I used the program which told me 3.4 strike at 162 with a target of 152 for a 60 minute mash. We striked at 162 but it came down to about 148, so we put the heat on (turket frier to an 8 gallon stainless steel pot) and got it around 153 and left it for an hour, and it only fell to 151, maybe 150 (which may be a bit lower than we want, but still doesn't explain why it came out so bad). So we took out the bag, sparged with 3.4 gal at 172. After doing this we were left with about 5.5 gallons and a pre-boil wort with a gravity of 1.024, which, using an online calculator, give us an efficiency of somewhere around 33-34%. My volume measurements weren't exact, I admit, but still, pretty bad.
I'm not exactly sure what we did wrong. The batch before this we did the same things and were around 60% efficiency (better, but still not great). Any thoughts? Both came out very weird looking, too. They looked like muddy water, kind of like when you're at the beach and you dig a hole, and then a wave comes in and the water in the whole mixes with a bunch of sand. I just put the first batch into the secondary yesterday and it looked really, really hazy, like seriously, muddy muddy water. And this batch yesterday (the first one described) was similar looking.
Because of our very low effeciency (I know it goes up after the boil, but it was still very low), we figured why not mess around with it a little and see what happens (it didn't seem to be a promising batch anyway). We added .5# of honey and .5# of corn syrup, and 4 oz dextrose (I know, not great for adding to a wort, but whatever). That helped get us an OG of 1.058 (maybe we should have skipped the dextrose), and the beer looked decent.
But still, there's an obvious problem, as our effeciency was only 33%. Not sure what we did wrong though. The volumes and temps were figured out using BrewPal, and we held a decent temperature. Also, I'm in NJ. Admittedly, I've never tested the water to find Ph and all that, but we've never had taste bproblems with out extract batches, and NJ water is supposedly pretty good.
Any suggestions? Any idea what I did wrong? As always, thanks for the help.
-Chris
So over the past week I've done my first 2 AG batches, and they did not go as well as I had hoped, so I was wondering if anyone could help me out a little bit. I did the brew in a bag and here's the summary of what I did:
Ingredients:
6 lbs 5 oz British pale Ale Malt
2 lbs 11 oz German Pilsner Malt
3.8 AAU Cascade (60 min) (.75 oz @ 5%)
3.8 AAU Cascade (30 min) (.75 oz @ 5%)
3.8 AAU Cascade (0 min) (.75 oz @ 5%)
.88 oz Amarillo (Dry Hop)
Nottingham Ale Yeast (WLP005 English Ale Yeast)
I used the program which told me 3.4 strike at 162 with a target of 152 for a 60 minute mash. We striked at 162 but it came down to about 148, so we put the heat on (turket frier to an 8 gallon stainless steel pot) and got it around 153 and left it for an hour, and it only fell to 151, maybe 150 (which may be a bit lower than we want, but still doesn't explain why it came out so bad). So we took out the bag, sparged with 3.4 gal at 172. After doing this we were left with about 5.5 gallons and a pre-boil wort with a gravity of 1.024, which, using an online calculator, give us an efficiency of somewhere around 33-34%. My volume measurements weren't exact, I admit, but still, pretty bad.
I'm not exactly sure what we did wrong. The batch before this we did the same things and were around 60% efficiency (better, but still not great). Any thoughts? Both came out very weird looking, too. They looked like muddy water, kind of like when you're at the beach and you dig a hole, and then a wave comes in and the water in the whole mixes with a bunch of sand. I just put the first batch into the secondary yesterday and it looked really, really hazy, like seriously, muddy muddy water. And this batch yesterday (the first one described) was similar looking.
Because of our very low effeciency (I know it goes up after the boil, but it was still very low), we figured why not mess around with it a little and see what happens (it didn't seem to be a promising batch anyway). We added .5# of honey and .5# of corn syrup, and 4 oz dextrose (I know, not great for adding to a wort, but whatever). That helped get us an OG of 1.058 (maybe we should have skipped the dextrose), and the beer looked decent.
But still, there's an obvious problem, as our effeciency was only 33%. Not sure what we did wrong though. The volumes and temps were figured out using BrewPal, and we held a decent temperature. Also, I'm in NJ. Admittedly, I've never tested the water to find Ph and all that, but we've never had taste bproblems with out extract batches, and NJ water is supposedly pretty good.
Any suggestions? Any idea what I did wrong? As always, thanks for the help.
-Chris