Finished My First AG!

[Ben_Persitz]

I kicked my dead guy keg yesterday and decided to do my first AG brew sesh as an IMPROMPTU BREW SESH! Bad idea, lol.

I already had the recipe drawn up, and the Seahawks were losing 38-7, so I ran to my LHBS at 4 pm and picked up my ingredients.

I began calibrating my long stem thermometer (which went out of calibration towards the end of my boil?!?) at about 5 PM and once I had the mash tun preheated and my water treated with Gypsum and Calcium Chloride, I mashed in.

TERRIFYING! I wanted to mash around 152 and I hit my temp exactly. 8.25 lbs of grain and 2.75 gallons of mash water. Checked the temp at the end of the hour, and it was still 152! Thanks flyguy for designing a great mashtun!

Then I treated and heated up my 4 gallons of sparge water (185 degrees to bring my bed temp to 170), sparged until I got about 4.75 gallons pre boil volume. Did a 65 minute boil, took about 20 minutes to chill my wort down to 70 degrees, rehydrated half my yeast in distilled boiled water (cooled to 70 degrees) and sprinkled the other half on top after I aerated and put the wort in my fermenter.

I did a pre boil gravity measurement and my pre boil o.g. was 1.047. I expected to hit about 1.058 for my POST boil, so I knew I was a little low. I took a grav sample after boil and I was at 1.051, but there was a bunch of hop gunk in the hydrometer, so I think I didn't get an accurate reading.

Based on the brewhouse efficiency calculator I got about 65% efficiency. I'm wondering how I can improve this. Here are some key factors:

I was doing a 3.5 gallon (3.5 gallons into the fermenter) batch, with a 4.5 gallon boil. I figured I'd boil off about .5-.75 gallons and I did. I left about .25-.5 gallons in the pot in trub.

I mashed at 152 cause I wanted a drier, crisper pale ale.

It took me about 10-20 minutes to collect my first runnings. I collected about 1.75-2 gallons from my 2.75 gallons of mash water.

Then I sparged with 4 gallons of water and collected about 2.5-3 gallons for the rest of my boil. It took me about 15-20 minutes to lauter this amount.

Did I leave sugars in the mash tun by not lautering that 1 to 1.25 gallons of water? Could this hurt my efficiency?? I had already collected my pre boil volume and did not want to boil for 2 hours to get down to my correct batch size.

Do I need to lauter slower?

All in all I am pretty happy. I didn't get a stuck sparge, I got 65% efficiency, it only took about 5.5 hours. I was SEMI close to my targeted O.G. and I think my beer will taste delicious.

 

[Docjowles]

Congrats your first batch! Sounds like it went great.

First of all 65% efficiency isn't terrible. But if you want to up it, it could be a number of things. Some LHBS's set their mills for a super coarse crush which gives lower efficiency; maybe yours does, dunno.

Were you batch or fly sparging? If you're batch sparging you probably did leave sugars behind by not fully draining the mash tun. After a few batches you'll figure out how much sparge water you actually need and that will work itself out. I don't fly sparge so I can't speak to that.

Also, if you are batch sparging, you only need to go slow for the first quart or two to settle the grain bed. Then just open the valve full bore and let her rip. So your speed wouldn't really have caused problems there.

One thing that has helped me personally is doing two smaller batches instead of one big batch. Could have been something else, but I did that this weekend and my efficiency jumped 10 points!

 

[Ben_Persitz]

I was batch sparging. I asked my LHBS about their crush and they said that 75% efficiency would be real good with their crush. 70% is about normal, 65% would be okay. Anything lower and I'm doing something wrong.

So they do crush a bit coarse.