simplebiabcalculator.com Question

[Mac MacFarlane]

I used this to calulate how much water I needed for my brew yesterday, I ended up with to much wort. About 1gal to much some was trub my kit was for 6gal why does it say transfer 6.5gal? I ended up with 1.042OG instead of 1.05.

 

[RM-MN]

You are asking a series of questions that are complicated. First off, they recommend that you transfer 6.5 gallons instead of the 6.64 that you should have ended up with in your boiling kettle according to their estimation because they expect you to leave some wort behind because it will be thick with hop material. You don't need to leave this as it will have wort that can make beer in it and the hops will settle out at the end of the fermentation. When fermentation ends and you allow the resulting beer to have time to clear there will be a bunch of proteins and hops in the bottom of the fermenter that you will leave there when you transfer to your bottling bucket, about half a gallon. That's why you transfer 6.5 when you expect 6 gallons to bottle.

When you use a recipe for all grain, the recipe is designed for a particular brewhouse efficiency. Yours was lower than that which got you a lower OG. Two reasons for that. One is the quality of the milling of the grain which is what drives the efficiency. Second is the amount of wort you actually got and transferred. The recipe expects you to boil off about 1 1/2 gallons of water. I think that is way too much as it takes a strong boil for a long time to boil off that much. I typically only boil off 1/2 gallon. Now with this much experience, you can start adjusting recipes to account for how you brew instead of how someone else brews.

 

[Mac MacFarlane]

Ok that makes sense thank you.
I've brewed two biab a bag so far and both were below the targeted efficiency, was watching a youtube video were he purposely added less water to start, at the end added the water needed to be at his OG using a formula. Anyone done this for biab?

 

[RM-MN]

Since my boil kettle is a little too small for the batches I make I always have to add water at the end but I do it by pouring it through the bag of grains which then captures more of the sugars (sparging is the term for this). This increases my brewhouse efficiency so I usually get a higher OG than the recipe would call for unless I adjust for that in the brewing software.

 

[Mac MacFarlane]

Do you sparge after the mash or boil?

 

[wsmith1625]

You could have extended your boil time to allow more water to evaporate, which would raise the gravity. This is not the correct way to plan a brew day, but an on the fly fix. When I switched to all grain brewing I looked at Simple BIAB Calculator , but I used Priceless BIAB Calculator instead. I have been very happy with it.