A Dumbass Mistake

Brewed an imperial IPA today. Or so I thought.

Brewing BIAB. had a brain wave, decided to tie the top of my bag into a knot and attach a rope so that at the end of the mash I could suspend the bag over the kettle and let it drip without killing my arms.

Great idea, right?

Wrong! OG was meant to be 1.094, came in at 1.060.

Securing the bag must have squeezed the grain and not allowed sufficient water circulation!

Beware, don't do this! I'm highly pissed off. Such a waste.

 

I have not done a biab but 30 points from target based on your description seems like there might be something else going on. Thats a lot of sugar missing. Still you can salvage it to a good brew!

 

Likely had one big dough ball since you could not stir. We all do dumb stuff at times.

 

Not a bad idea. Just wait until the end of the mash to do it. I did the same thing and tied the string around a cabinet knob above the stove. Make sure you get a big bag and leave lots of room in the bag for the grains and water to is when sparging.

 

Did you mill your grains (that is to say, crush the outer husk so sugar conversion can occur)? Like jbguzzi said, 30 points off base seems like something more than just a tight bag.

 

It was definitely the tight bag. My last few BIABs have come in between 70 and 75%, and that was the only thing that was different.

The crush was good as far as I could tell

 

If I'm reading this right, you did this at the beginning of the mash, correct? Did you stir when adding the grain and for how long?

Well, at 1.060 you still got an IPA. It may end up being pretty hoppy though.

 

Yeah I stirred and flipped the bag around a good bit. But because of the bag being tied, it was essentially a tea bag, I couldn't get my mash paddle inside to bag to stir up the grain.

That's what I'm worried about, a whole bunch of hops in this beer and no malt to match it. It's going to have to be called hopspolsion or something.

 

for 30 point off i would think the center of the bag of grain was dry. i can't imagine that was the case. recheck your recipe especially water volume. something else has to be off here.

 

Adjusted recipe to account for extra 0.5 gallons that I ended up with (boil off rate of newer kettle is lower than I expected), and estimated OG is still 1.080