first batch questions

[Vesteroid]

I did my very first all grain batch yesterday and have a few questions. I will try and detail out the particulars, but ask if I overlooked anything.

I have a recipe from local shop for apricot ale

supposed to be a 5 gallon batch

had

12lbs 2 row
1.5 carapils

mash 154


I tried to use brew smiths calc to figure out how hot to make my water in the mash kettle so when I added the grains it would even out to 154, I believe it said 171. That was WAY high. by the time I had all the grain added and stirred up well I think it settled down to 158. I did a recirculate mash and after a few minutes, I didnt see it dropping quickly, so I added small amounts of cold filtered water until it got down to 154. I had to light my fire pretty often for about a minute or two at a time to keep the temp close and even then it would seem to shoot up to 156 and drop to 153 way faster than I expected. I was using both a thermopen at the sparge arm output and the thermo in the mash tun (10 gallon stainless pot). The thermo stayed more constant, the recirc mash obviously went up and down based on flame or no flame. If I had to guess I would say I averaged more at 156 than 154.

It says to mash out at 170, so I slowly around 55 minutes raised my mash temp by the burner to 170 (probably took me another 10 minutes or so.

I had my sparge water at 171 because I thought I would lose a degree or so through the pump and tubes. I started sparging but grossly underestimated how fast I was draining the water from the mash tun and in 8 minutes I had 3 gallons in my boil kettle. I tried to dial it back and balance the gravity flow out of my mash tun to the input via pump from the HLT, but didnt do a very good job and I think the entire 7 gallons ended up in my boil kettle in about 22 minutes.

The recipe said to have 7 gallons in the boil. I think I must have had the pot tilted a bit on the pavers when I filled as once I got it on the burner it was reading lower, but I had already dumped the excess liquid in my mash tun.

I took a refractometer reading before boil and had 1.057 Since the recipe says estimated og of 1.054-1.058 I didnt know quite what to do. What I decided to do was to get the pot boiling but add very small amounts of filtered water through out the boil so that I kept the temp up but did not increase the OG too much.

I ended up after an hour at 1.059 reading again from the refractometer.


So how was it so high?

 

[chickypad]

For all grain recipes you really need to adjust for your own system's efficiency, volumes, etc. Do I understand correctly that your recipe estimated 5 gal finished at 1.054-1.058? Sounds like whoever wrote the recipe was planning on pretty bad efficiency - with 13.5 lbs of grain that's like 57%. Maybe it's including a fair amount in losses, if 6 gal post boil it would be closer to 70% efficiency. What was your ending volume?

 

[MagicMatt]

I took a refractometer reading before boil and had 1.057 Since the recipe says estimated og of 1.054-1.058 I didnt know quite what to do. What I decided to do was to get the pot boiling but add very small amounts of filtered water through out the boil so that I kept the temp up but did not increase the OG too much.

I ended up after an hour at 1.059 reading again from the refractometer.


So how was it so high?

It was high because you didn't collect enough runoff from your sparge. The longer you collect, the lower it will make your pre-boil gravity, as the sparge water near the end is likely more around 1.015-1.020. Thus, the longer you collect, the more you dilute the total volume. You said you collect less than intended, which means your pre-boil gravity was higher than it should have been. You added water, but did you measure how much? If so, you can calculate your effective pre-boil gravity, and you'll likely be close to where you should have been.

The boil obviously increases your gravity. I usually gain 10-12 points on an hour long boil. This explains the increase you asked about. It's supposed to increase.