Yield Question

I have been making 5 gallon all grain batches, and I use the beer smith calc to account for evaporation and all of that jazz but I still never get a full 5 gallons out of my batches. Is this the case for everyone? I thought about adding more water to the sparge but then my OG goes down...ideas?

 

If you are constantly short on your volume at the end of the boil, then you need to relook at your boil off rate and grain absorption. In the meantime, while figuring this out, do as Yooper suggested to get closer to your target volume.

 

You are correct, I said that wrong, it will go up.

 

Example, I brewed the Cream of Three Crops that is popular on this page and I I probably yielded closer to 4.25 gallons with the 5 gallon recipe with an OG of 1.038. So, I got less beer and probably not a strong one either.

All of my calculations seemed spot on, I even kept a great mash temp the whole time. I will need to really look at my boil off rate more carefully.

 

Are you making sure you account for mashtun dead space within the Beersmith app? My mashtun has roughly 1/2 gallon of dead space that never fully drains into my boil kettle. Just a thought.

 

Just to be clear, with those volumes are you talking volume into fermenter or packaged beer?

 

My local shop sets up their recipes so I get about 5.5 gallons into the fermenter. But by the time the hops, yeast, and trub settle to the bottom of the fermenter, I really only yield about 4.5 gallons or so. I try not to get greedy and suck all that yeast off the bottom of the carboy, since I figure I'd rather have a cleaner product into my bottles than an extra quarter gallon of booze.

 

Ok, this is exactly what I am talking about. So this is fairly normal then?

 

Yeah that's pretty normal. You can scale up your recipes to like 6 gallons, but then your carboy would be full all the way to the top and krausen would totally blast off out of the top of it and make an enormous mess. It's just something you gotta deal with and one more reason why brewing larger batches is so much more appealing to some people.

 

It's best to account for volume loss at all stages so you know where you'll end up at packaging time.
Here's how I approach it:
Collect 7 gallons of wort into brew kettle.
An hour boil leaves me with 6 gallons.
After chilling and leaving much of the solids behind I'll transfer 5.5 gallons into primary.
You'll loose a bit of volume to the trub & yeast later, sampling, and a bit in the bottling bucket still providing 5 - 5.25 gallons of bottled beer.

If you use Beersmith you can set up the anticipated volume losses and it will calculate your volumes needed. I just typically collect 7 gallons and design recipes for 5.5 gallon batches.

 

I've been playing around with these numbers too. I did a test and had about 1/2 gal boil off in an hour, but then on brew day it actually boiled off about 1.1. I figure I'll keep track and use my new average for each batch.

Here's a question. With it being so easy to get 5 gallon buckets vs 6.5, you'd think there would be lots of recipes aiming for 4.5 gallons into the fermenter, which is what I do. Why isn't that more common?