SATXbrew
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- Feb 25, 2008
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My brother and I brewed a Barley Wine last night and we got horrible results with our mash and I was wondering if anyone had some insight as to how I can modify my process.
This has happened twice now with our big beers that we've tried. I've done many successful normal gravity beers, but for some reason my calculations haven't been working for these big beers.
Grains
20lbs 2-Row
1.5 Crystal 90L
1.5 Buscuit
Mashed for about 1hr 20 mins at 148 degrees. Mash ratio of 1.75gallons x 23 lbs = 10 gallons for mash volume. My tun only held about 9 gallons.. Mash out was supposed to be about 5.5 gallons, actual was about 6.
Sparged with 3 gallons. As Im writing this I realized I multiplied my est. loss wrong. I used my old notes and calculated .2 of loss x 12.5. Should have been x 23. I dont think this was the issue. Almost all came out so we had about 9 gallons in kettle. We were shooting for 7 so this was way over our estimate. Using this method, I am usually spot on with my measurements.
My gravity before boil was about 1054 which is crazy with that much grain. My brother also did a Wee Heavy with about the same amount of grain and ended up with about 1070 gravity. That is better but still seems low for that much grain.
What can we do to improve this? Mash with less water? If I do that, would I sparge with more water?
We had DME on hand so we were still able to obtain 1094 OG, but I would like to be hitting those kind of numbers with the grain alone. Next time we are going to just take a gravity reading right after the mash.
Thanks for the feedback!!
This has happened twice now with our big beers that we've tried. I've done many successful normal gravity beers, but for some reason my calculations haven't been working for these big beers.
Grains
20lbs 2-Row
1.5 Crystal 90L
1.5 Buscuit
Mashed for about 1hr 20 mins at 148 degrees. Mash ratio of 1.75gallons x 23 lbs = 10 gallons for mash volume. My tun only held about 9 gallons.. Mash out was supposed to be about 5.5 gallons, actual was about 6.
Sparged with 3 gallons. As Im writing this I realized I multiplied my est. loss wrong. I used my old notes and calculated .2 of loss x 12.5. Should have been x 23. I dont think this was the issue. Almost all came out so we had about 9 gallons in kettle. We were shooting for 7 so this was way over our estimate. Using this method, I am usually spot on with my measurements.
My gravity before boil was about 1054 which is crazy with that much grain. My brother also did a Wee Heavy with about the same amount of grain and ended up with about 1070 gravity. That is better but still seems low for that much grain.
What can we do to improve this? Mash with less water? If I do that, would I sparge with more water?
We had DME on hand so we were still able to obtain 1094 OG, but I would like to be hitting those kind of numbers with the grain alone. Next time we are going to just take a gravity reading right after the mash.
Thanks for the feedback!!