Gravity issues

[Philmac]

I have brewed a saison and my OG is lower (1.052) than it should be according to the recipe (1.060). I take it i put in too much water?
I've been struggling with finding out the amount of water to put in for the mash- is there any guides for this?
Does anyone have any tips for getting this part of the process right- and if possible keep it simple as i find there is a lot of immensely technical stuff that's way beyond me as a beginner brewer!
How do you go about fixing this in the future- i think i will just have to leave it this time around... Is that going to be a significant issue with this brew?..

Thanks!

 

[IslandLizard]

Do you mash in a separate vessel (cooler, mash tun) or BIAB?
Do you mash full volume or sparge? Sparge once or twice?
Do you boil full volume or top up fermentor? For all grain you really need to boil full volume for best efficiency.
What do you use to formulate your recipes?

I use BeerSmith for recipe formulation. It will give me my strike and sparge volumes.
Occasionally I still use Brew365's online water calculator. It's designed for traditional mashing (non BIAB). But could be easily adapted for BIAB too, by simply combining strike water and sparge water volumes.

If you do BIAB, not sure which calculator is best for that. Brewer's Friends' perhaps, but it looked overly complex to me.

You need to know how much you boil off, which can be a fixed volume per hour or a % of your volume. Around 1 gallon per hour is common. Start there and tweak.
There's also mash tun "dead space" to consider.
It takes a few brews to narrow down those numbers.

Another reason for lower gravity than expected is your mash efficiency. Look at your milled grain.
A too coarse grain crush (typical LHBS and online vendors' mills) can cause havoc on your extraction. Mill twice or better yet, adjust the gap (most LHBS won't let you touch that though). Or add some more base grain (5-10%). If the grist is very coarse, mash 15-30' longer, see if it improves.

 

[applescrap]

I have brewed a saison and my OG is lower (1.052) than it should be according to the recipe (1.060). I take it i put in too much water?
I've been struggling with finding out the amount of water to put in for the mash- is there any guides for this?
Does anyone have any tips for getting this part of the process right- and if possible keep it simple as i find there is a lot of immensely technical stuff that's way beyond me as a beginner brewer!
How do you go about fixing this in the future- i think i will just have to leave it this time around... Is that going to be a significant issue with this brew?..

Thanks!

Iirc doug told me 60 percent of water for mash 40 percent for sparge until grain bill gets huge. It's closer to 50 50 with absorption or something like that. Also if you squeeze that grain somehow before you sparge I think that will increase your efficiency quite a bit. you want to get as much of the sweet liquor out before you put in the sparge water. Note i brew mostly full volume and squeeze. Also I don't own a hydrometer so I have no idea what my efficiency is. But I will say that if I was going to batch sparge this is how I would do it.

 

[Philmac]

Island Lizard-
I am doing BIAB- i mash and boil in the same vessel- then i put the wort through a plate cooler and directly into the fermenter.
I boil the full volume and do not splarge usually. I usually squeeze the bag to get additional wort.
My local shop double milled the grain to be sure this time.
It does get really complicated quite quickly!

 

[kh54s10]

It's not really all that complicated.

In this case you need to use enough water for grain absorption and boil off so that you collect the proper amount of wort when transferred to your fermenter. If you have too much wort your OG will be low, If you have to little your OG will be high.

If you collect the proper amount of wort and your OG is off it is either that the calculations made to determine OG were off, or your grain crush is not optimum.

You may need to fine tune over several batches to determine your boil off rate.

Added: Make sure your hydrometer is calibrated to read 1.000 in distilled water (I just use tap water and figure it is close enough) at the temperature listed on the hydrometer.