A very odd outcome

[dominojoe08]

I brewed my first All Grain batch and came out with a very strange result. The recipe included

2 Lbs English Dark Crystal, milled
1 Lb Weyerman Carafa II, milled
1 Lb Weyerman Carawheat, milled
1 Lb Briess Midnight Wheat Malt, milled
2 Lb Blend of Dark Chocolate and 2-row Crystal 40L (Older grains being depleted from extract brewing) - A lot of this was unfortunately ground into more of a powder.

I mashed in at 158F for 1 hour. After the grains were resting, I did miss a few steps. I didn't stir a few times in the hour. I didn't drain slowly to recirculate, but I did recirculate several times. Unfortunately I was too speedy, and probably disrupted the grain bed in the process. My sparging process was off as well as I didn't really temp the water and did not let it rest before draining into the brew pot. I'm sure the ending wort was not as clean as is it should've been. The thing is, even if I totally botched the entire process, I should've still came out with a sugary wort. After the boil, I took a gravity reading when it was still hot, and came up with a calculated OG of 1.035 after adjusting for temp. I took another reading when it was closer to pitching temp in order to check my calculations. 1.034. Great! Not quite the target I wanted, but I believed it to be fairly efficient based on other recipes and considering it only ended up being 3 gallons. So I pitch the yeast, wait a week and get another reading. 1.034. What the hell? So I taste it and it's basically like the most bitter coffee you've ever had. If it wasn't sugar in the wort giving me a reading of 1.034, what the hell was it? Unhappy with this terrible result, I decided that because this was all experimental anyway, I'd add 12 lbs of LME and 2 gallons of boiled and cooled water to it, and stir to reactivate the yeast. OG was now 1.086. A day later I saw bubbles in the airlock, so I knew it was fermenting. 5 days later, I get another reading. 1.038. Tastes a hell of a lot better, and was actually enjoyable.

I know some of you are reading this and probably pulling your hair out lol, but to me it was just the 1st experiment. Even though I blew the entire process, I since then upgraded a few of my items. I got the 8 gallon brew pot, immersion wort chiller, burner, grinder, and a lot more grains. The 2nd All Grain batch will be much more clean compared to the nightmare described above, and I hope to get a more desirable outcome.

I'm still just curious...Why does it seem I pulled no sugar from the grains, yet got an OG of 1.034? It didn't seem to ferment at all.

 

[day_trippr]

Fermentables, and Base Malt.

You have some reading to do

Cheers!

 

[doug293cz]

The problem started with your recipe. It contains no base malt (2-row, pilsner, etc.) The base malts contain the enzymes that convert starch to fermentable sugar. The roasted and crystal grains that you used contain some soluble non-fermentable sugars, and that's pretty much all you extracted during your mash. Base grains should make up ~85% or more of your grain bill, unless you really know what you are doing.

Brew on

 

[Conehead]

Buy this book, but can read it online.

www.howtobrew.com

 

[khannon]

Diastatic Power, or a lack of.
Take a look at
https://docs.brewersfriend.com/faq/recipes#recipes30

 

[myndflyte]

You pulled starch from the grain. A gravity reading just tells you the density of the liquid you have. It's not a measure of just the sugar in the liquid. With all those dark grains and no conversion, I'm not surprised it tastes like the most bitter coffee ever. As others have said, you need base malt as your primary malt. Reading Palmer's How to Brew and posting your recipe here for feedback would be good places to start before your next batch.

 

[Spartan1979]

AS mentioned above, there are no base grains. While it didn't have anything to do with your issue, your mash temp of 158 is probably too high. Most of my mashes are in the 147-152 range.