Beer starter

[chickypad]

It's hard to get plain top off water to mix well with the dense wort, so it's very common to get an artificially low reading. You're better off calculating using the post boil sample. Wait until the reading is definitely stable then you can go ahead and bottle.

 

[Bellybuster]

the thermo resting on the bottom of the pot will be useless.
did you chill the samples?? If the wort is hot it will throw the reading way off. Your reading is bang on if wort was at your mash temps.
Starting to look better as more info comes out. Would have saved 4 pages had we had it in the beginning

why a bag in one pic of th mash and no bag in the next?

 

[Mattf15004]

Brew shop guy sold me a bag which burned at the bottom of the pot and broke very quickly, i checked the readings immediately after the wort was chilled to 75 dgrees.

 

[Mattf15004]

Any other advice, i plan to put into secondary fermrnter with dry hop in a less than a week, which will be third week of fermentation, then with 10 days of a 2 week secondary initiating a cold crash by filling my cooler surrounding glass carboys with ice

 

[Gavin C]

Pass on the secondary, pass on the labor intensive cold-crash.

Once the beer is finished fermenting the krausen will fall, the beer will clear and you can add the dry hops to the fermentor. Just pop them in there for however many days you want. 3-7 days are oft advised timeframes.

Then bottle the beer taking care to keep the syphon beneath the hops and above the trub. Clear beer to bottling bucket will result. You can also place a sanitized screen over the syphone end in the bucket to minimize hop particulate getting through. Not to fine a screen as it will block. A hop sock will work.

Alternatively put the dry-hops in a hop sock and then into the beer when dry-hopping. (sanitize the hopsock first wit boiling for 1 minute or a star san bath)

 

[Gavin C]

Also avoid burning the bag by keeping it off the bottom of the pot with a small cooling rack or inverted collander.

Bad luck there. Good news is 5 gallon paint strainer bags ar $2 at HD/Lowes. Lots of folks use them for mashing in a bag. BIAB

 

[Mattf15004]

Great, thanks so much for all the feedback.

 

[Mattf15004]

So I did move the wort into a secondary fermenter because I've had issues in the past of sediments getting into the final product and in doing so I tested the gravity again and it was just slightly lower. I also tasted the wort again and this time I could taste a significant difference, it now taste like its getting where needs to be, I'm not sure what's up with a specific gravity discrepancy but my issue with fermentation I believe came from trying to keep the temperature around 67 degrees. I had no way of doing this except adding ice and I think the temperature just got to low