[I apologize in advance for the long post]
First a little background: I'm not new to homebrewing, my brother and I used to do it 10 or 15 years ago frequently, though only extract and partial mash, nothing all grain. Never had a "bad" batch, though some that were flat, or a little off, etc. Anyway, fast forward 10 years and my wife has expressed interest in home brewing... Sweet! So I ordered a 1 gallon summer wheat kit from brooklyn brewshop.
That was 4 months ago. You know, life gets in the way. Anyway on Saturday we finally had a chance to brew it. It went ok.
2 quarts of strike water up to 170 degrees, mashed in and the temp dropped to 151 as expected.
Put the whole pot in the oven at 150 degrees for the hour mash. Here's where the weirdness started. Every 15 minutes or so I'd stir it and check the temp, but I'd get wildly fluctuation temp. In one spot it'd be 145 degrees, an inch or two over it'd be 170 degrees, and on the other side of the pot be somewhere in the 150s. This happened every time I'd check. I'm quite certain my thermometer is good, I used my thermopen that had recently been calibrated. I'm a little confused about the wide range in temps. I can see the bottom that's closer to the heating element getting hotter, but I would have thought with a good stir (and I did stir very well) it'd all be evened out and I'd get reasonably close temps. Anyway, the mash continued for an hour, with me concerned over the mash temp the whole time.
After an hour I mashed out to 170 (or at least my best guess at it since I was still getting wide temp readings), and had a gallon of sparge water at 170 waiting. Sparging was done by pouring the mash into a strainer over another pot, then ladeling the sparge water over the grain bed, followed by sparging the whole thing over the grain bed a second time.
Boiled for an hour with a light boil, just enough to keep the wort circulating, not a full rolling boil. Stirred occasionally and when the hops were added. After the boil, into an ice bath and got the temp down to 70 in about 5 minutes. Poured the wort through a strainer/funnel into the carboy and hit issue number 2. Much more boil-off than I'd anticipated. I only ended up with a little more than half a gallon of wort. I topped it off with distilled water, then hit the final problem. I measured the gravity and after correcting for temp came up with 1.025. Much lower than I would expect, though the directions from BBS don't list gravity. It has me a little worried.
Anyway, I pitched the packet of dry yeast and let it go. Sunday morning it was going gangbusters and nearly overflowed the catch basin I had the blow off tube in.
So, sorry for writing a book, but long story short: is the OG too low? I'm expecting that this will probably be a low alcohol beer with such a low OG. Is there anything I could have done, or can do at this point to bring it up? I thought about boiling some DME and adding it, but I don't have any on hand and at this point it's kind of late I'd think. Second question is, are the widely varying mash temps normal, or did I do something to piss off the beer Gods?
Thanks!
First a little background: I'm not new to homebrewing, my brother and I used to do it 10 or 15 years ago frequently, though only extract and partial mash, nothing all grain. Never had a "bad" batch, though some that were flat, or a little off, etc. Anyway, fast forward 10 years and my wife has expressed interest in home brewing... Sweet! So I ordered a 1 gallon summer wheat kit from brooklyn brewshop.
That was 4 months ago. You know, life gets in the way. Anyway on Saturday we finally had a chance to brew it. It went ok.
2 quarts of strike water up to 170 degrees, mashed in and the temp dropped to 151 as expected.
Put the whole pot in the oven at 150 degrees for the hour mash. Here's where the weirdness started. Every 15 minutes or so I'd stir it and check the temp, but I'd get wildly fluctuation temp. In one spot it'd be 145 degrees, an inch or two over it'd be 170 degrees, and on the other side of the pot be somewhere in the 150s. This happened every time I'd check. I'm quite certain my thermometer is good, I used my thermopen that had recently been calibrated. I'm a little confused about the wide range in temps. I can see the bottom that's closer to the heating element getting hotter, but I would have thought with a good stir (and I did stir very well) it'd all be evened out and I'd get reasonably close temps. Anyway, the mash continued for an hour, with me concerned over the mash temp the whole time.
After an hour I mashed out to 170 (or at least my best guess at it since I was still getting wide temp readings), and had a gallon of sparge water at 170 waiting. Sparging was done by pouring the mash into a strainer over another pot, then ladeling the sparge water over the grain bed, followed by sparging the whole thing over the grain bed a second time.
Boiled for an hour with a light boil, just enough to keep the wort circulating, not a full rolling boil. Stirred occasionally and when the hops were added. After the boil, into an ice bath and got the temp down to 70 in about 5 minutes. Poured the wort through a strainer/funnel into the carboy and hit issue number 2. Much more boil-off than I'd anticipated. I only ended up with a little more than half a gallon of wort. I topped it off with distilled water, then hit the final problem. I measured the gravity and after correcting for temp came up with 1.025. Much lower than I would expect, though the directions from BBS don't list gravity. It has me a little worried.
Anyway, I pitched the packet of dry yeast and let it go. Sunday morning it was going gangbusters and nearly overflowed the catch basin I had the blow off tube in.
So, sorry for writing a book, but long story short: is the OG too low? I'm expecting that this will probably be a low alcohol beer with such a low OG. Is there anything I could have done, or can do at this point to bring it up? I thought about boiling some DME and adding it, but I don't have any on hand and at this point it's kind of late I'd think. Second question is, are the widely varying mash temps normal, or did I do something to piss off the beer Gods?
Thanks!