Didn't get all of my crushed grains added to the mash...now what?

Trying to do a 12 gallon recipe using 24 lbs of grain. After crushing the grain I had to separte it into 2 separate buckets to hold everything. I am 1/2 through the boil and notice I have 2-3 lbs of uncrushed grain that did not make it into the mash. This explains why my pre-boil gravity was low and I collected more wort volume than I should have. I am thinking about doing a quick stove top brew in the bag method to extract what I can from these 2-3 pounds.

Anyone have any suggestions on what I can do?

 

Your first instinct sounds good to me.
Just a mini-mash/boil on the stove, combine the two.

 

Either boil longer to concentrate it and get your OG up to where you were wanting it, or have a weaker brew if it's not off by too much.

Could also add some DME if you have it.

 

3lbs of grain is an easy stove top mash and boil. You might as well just do it that way. Just be sure you calculate your water amounts properly - The only water loss you'll have is from grain absorption, so should just be up about 2 quarts maybe in your pre-boil? ...because of those 2-3 lbs of grain wouldn't have absorbed it. You could probably boil 15 minutes longer with the main batch to take care of that - start your hop additions when you have 60 minutes left (assuming a 60 min boil). If you choose to hop the small batch, you'll need to split them appropriately - but I don't know if I'd bother for that small amount. Your hop utilization in the big batch will be just a little less because of the barely reduced volume of the wort, but I doubt it would be noticeable.

 

Thanks for the advice everyone. I did a brew in the bag stove top for the remaining 2+ lbs and was able to get my gravity to within 2 points while slightly overshooting my volume. I initially thought about letting it boil longer to reduce the volume but I realized that I had already added my bittering hops at 60 min and was not sure how this would affect the taste if I boiled them longer than 60 minutes. Thus, if my hops went 75 minutes - 90 minutes would this greatly affect the utilization of the hops?

 

Hey - good enough. I'm sure the final product will still be great. If you boiled off the extra volume, you would have increased the hop utilization by a little bit and your IBUs would be a bit higher, but probably not much after 15 additional minutes. My calculations show less than 10% increase roughly. As long as you don't change your late hop addition times. i.e. - If a 5 minute to flameout addition became a 20 minute addition, you'd extract much more bittering acids than aroma and THAT would be a change for the worse for the final product.