BIAB low mash temp-in progress

[Johow]

This is a 2.75 gallon batch I'm trying to brew with a 5 gallon kettle. I brought 3 gallons of water to 160 and added my grains (7.25 lbs) and the mash is very thick. My temps then dropped to around 140. I turned in the stove and stirred but I'm having trouble getting a uniform temp due to the thickness of the mash. At the bottom of the kettle I can get it to mash temp but near the top it's still around 140 no matter how much I stir.
I've got 2 gallons of sparse water in another pot but the big kettle is full until I pull the grain bag.
Any ideas for saving this batch or what are the consequences of mashing this low?

 

[Onkel_Udo]

This is a 2.75 gallon batch I'm trying to brew with a 5 gallon kettle. I brought 3 gallons of water to 160 and added my grains (7.25 lbs) and the mash is very thick. My temps then dropped to around 140. I turned in the stove and stirred but I'm having trouble getting a uniform temp due to the thickness of the mash. At the bottom of the kettle I can get it to mash temp but near the top it's still around 140 no matter how much I stir.
I've got 2 gallons of sparse water in another pot but the big kettle is full until I pull the grain bag.
Any ideas for saving this batch or what are the consequences of mashing this low?

Mashing low gives you one thing and one maybe.

Dryer beer from more fermentable wort...guaranteed.

Maybe longer time to full conversion so either test for it or just go to a full 60-75 minutes.

 

[EJay]

I'm surprised you dropped that much. I do the same thing - 5 gallon pot, nominally 2.5g into fermenter, so usually around 3.5G strike water, and I only lose about 5 degrees at mash-in.

Stirring should get you consistent temperatures at all levels PDQ, so something isn't right.

 

[madscientist451]

Simple, just use the "rest" mash calculator on the Green Bay Rackers website:
http://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml plug in your current temp, target temp, weight of grains and mash thickness and it will figure how much boiling water to add to hit your target.
Note, you may not have enough room in your pot, transfer a gallon of your mash to a bucket then once you
get your additional mash water added to pot#1 put the mash from the bucket in pot #2.
The rackers website says that your mash should only be using 3.57 gallons of space, is there any chance your grain bill is off?
Anyway, if you reach your mash temp, get an old coat or sleeping bag and wrap the pot up and forget about it for an hour, you'll be good to go.
Next time, go to walmart and for $20 get a 5 gallon round cooler and mash with your bag in that.

 

[Johow]

Cool, I don't mind dryer beer at all. I'll let it run a little long. I guess I could try to pull a sample to measure but like I said it's pretty thick.

 

[Johow]

I can't realy take a useful hydrometer reading because this is a partial mash.

 

[Johow]

Simple, just use the "rest" mash calculator on the Green Bay Rackers website:
http://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml plug in your current temp, target temp, weight of grains and mash thickness and it will figure how much boiling water to add to hit your target.
Note, you may not have enough room in your pot, transfer a gallon of your mash to a bucket then once you
get your additional mash water added to pot#1 put the mash from the bucket in pot #2.
The rackers website says that your mash should only be using 3.57 gallons of space, is there any chance your grain bill is off?
Anyway, if you reach your mash temp, get an old coat or sleeping bag and wrap the pot up and forget about it for an hour, you'll be good to go.
Next time, go to walmart and for $20 get a 5 gallon round cooler and mash with your bag in that.

Yes something is off, my OG is supposed to be 1.058 but my pre boil OG is 1.06. I'm supposed to end up with 2.75 gallons in my fermenter and there is now way I'm gonna boil off that much water and if I did I'm gonna be making barley wine or at least some mighty stron ipa, maybe a double. Well, we'll see....
I'll post my recipe when I have time.

 

[Onkel_Udo]

Yes something is off, my OG is supposed to be 1.058 but my pre boil OG is 1.06. I'm supposed to end up with 2.75 gallons in my fermenter and there is now way I'm gonna boil off that much water and if I did I'm gonna be making barley wine or at least some mighty stron ipa, maybe a double. Well, we'll see....
I'll post my recipe when I have time.

Um, I am confused .002 off is not big...shorten your boil or top up with water. What am I not getting? Is your volume way off (low my guess)?

 

[Johow]

Um, I am confused .002 off is not big...shorten your boil or top up with water. What am I not getting? Is your volume way off (low my guess)?

No, I'm over volume and over OG. My pre boil was higher than what the end of boil gravity should be so I'm assuming that my OG (end of boil) will be even higher and I'm guessing I'll have way more than the 2.75 gal I need to fill my fermenter. I'm 15 minutes from the end of boil and I still have 3.5 gallons. I guess I'll have some hop loss, we'll see.

 

[johnsant]

I don't understand ? How did you get 3.5 gal. if you put 3 gal. in for mash. Something is not right Lucy.

Did you put all that sparge water in? If so I can understand why you are over your post boil volume. Only sparge with that amount you need to reach your pre-boil volume.

 

[Johow]

I started with about 3 gallons of strike water, brought it up to near 160 deg. My recipe called for 4.95 gallons total so I held about 2 gallons of sparge water. Either I did something wrong in designing the recipe (most likely) or ?
It was a "fresh Squeeze" clone from the Home Brewers Association and I attemped to scale it for 2.75 gallons using Brewers Friend. My scaled recipe called for 7.25 lbs of grain and 4.95 total gallons of water. I was trying to do this in a 5 gallon kettle (which as it turns out is only about 4.75 gallons). So as I was saying I started the mash using 3 gallons and with the grain in my temp dropped to around 140 deg and the mash was so think that it was difficult to evenly heat the mash though I tried. I ended up with numbers higher than the recipe estimated so instead of an OG of 1.058, actual was 1.072. The grains were weighed at my LHBS so I'm not really sure of the actual amount. That seems to me to be the most likely source of the mismatch. Anyway, I have a fermenter full of hopeful beer and we'll see what we get. I am a rookie and am trying to learn.
Thanks for your input

 

[Johow]

I don't understand ? How did you get 3.5 gal. if you put 3 gal. in for mash. Something is not right Lucy.

Did you put all that sparge water in? If so I can understand why you are over your post boil volume. Only sparge with that amount you need to reach your pre-boil volume.

And no, I didn't put all the sparge water in, just topped up my kettle to what was supposed to be the pre boil volume.

 

[johnsant]

I must be missing something in the OP you said it was to be a 2.75 batch you without running the figures myself it seems that you top off water should have been somewhere around 3.75 with a boil-off of around about 1 gal. which would put you at where you wanted to be.(JIMHO) But I could be wrong!(Its been known to happen)

 

[Bellybuster]

What a exactly is "near 160deg" ? That strike temp should have gotten you at least 150.

 

[Johow]

What a exactly is "near 160deg" ? That strike temp should have gotten you at least 150.

Should have, I was at 159 when I added my grain. After thinking about this, the false bottom in my kettle is about 1.5 gallons above the bottom of my kettle so that much water was excluded from the mash which is why it was so thick and difficult to stir. And probably why the temp cooled so much toward the top of the kettle. The other thing is my grains were weighed at the LHBS and I think I may have had to much grain since my gravity readings came out too high. Also my efficiency in BF was set to 60% which I guess led to more grain being called for. Does that make sense. OG was 1.072, should have been 1.058.

johnsant, I'm just ending up with some very strong beer, I don't have a problem with that but I'd like to start getting closer to the planned result.

 

[Bellybuster]

1.5 gallons dead space below your fb is huge, that's 28% of your entire tun volume. Not an issue if recirculating but very much so for single infusion. If anything your mash should be suffering

 

[Johow]

Ever wake up in the middle of the night with a thought of something you have been pondering?
The day I brewed this batch of beer, I went to my LHBS to get a few things. One of those things was 1.5 lbs of crystal 40 for a later batch. Well in thinking back I realized I absent mindedly added that grain to this batch. I plugged that into BF and came up with just about what I got. It's plobably gonna suck but it's fermenting so we'll see......

 

[johnsant]

Hey it'll be beer and you never know what the end results will be untill you taste it. Many good berws were made because of mistakes. Expect the worst, hope for the best.