First All Grain Brew

I have a couple of questions about my first all grain I just put in the fermenter. I made what I thought was going to be a 5 gallon batch and only ended up with 3.29 gallons (15 liters). I'm assuming what I lost was due to the grains soaking up some water and some was lost due to evaporation during the boil.

My first question is, should this batch still turn out ok if everything else is well or is it ruined? Will the yeast (Wyeast smack pack) be too much for this small batch since its Pre-measured for 5 gallons? Will this cause off flavors like real yeasty beer? Will this increase ABV? Lastly, how can I avoid this next time? What's a good amount to start with? I started with 3 gallons for my strike water then 4.5 for a fly sparge. I thought 7.5 would be plenty to end up with 5-5.5 gallons in the fermenter.

Thanks ahead for the help!
Ken

 

typically you want to mash with 1.25 gallons/ lbs of grist. 3 gallon mash sounds kinda small but if thats what 1.25 gallons/lbs than your fine. 7.5 gallons will get soaked up fast by any substantial grist.

i would recommend using brewing software like beer smith, it will calculate your volumes and strike temps. Helps alot when you're getting started with AG.

The beer is probably fine. You'll probably just end up with an imperial beer. Did you take any gravity readings?

 

Your beer will be fine. Might end up a little stronger than you were expecting. You certainly didn't overdo it with the yeast. Many people consider the directions on the liquid yeast packages to be far too conservative and make starters so they can grow up additional yeast prior to fermenting their beer. So one smack pack in 3.5 gallons or so should be pretty spot on. The only thing that would cause off flavors is if you fermented outside the temperature range for your yeast.

As to the water volume issue you're right about both boil off and grain absorption being culprits. There is brewing software such as Beer Smith that will do all sorts of lovely calculations for you to figure out how much water you'll need. I find grain absorption around .15 gallons absorbed per pound of grain to be more or less a good starting point for dialing your system in. Boil off will depend on the kettle you use and how vigorous of a boil you have. You can always test this by filling your kettle with say 5 gallons of water, boiling for 60 minutes, and then seeing how much water you have left so you can figure out your boil off rate per hour.

 

Thanks for the replies! I think I will soon invest in Beer Smith. The beer that I made was a Dunkelweisen and had about 14 lbs of grain so I'm thinking now that I just plain ole miscalculated my strike and/or sparge water. Maybe I'll just have 3.2 gallons of a high ABV wheat beer....

 

Oh, and yes I did take a gravity reading. It was 1.066