First ever brew, extract, OG 1.111 but I used high gravity yeast; what am I in for?

[Daniel B]

So yesterday was brew day for this kit and I am trying to figure out if I did something wrong (hopefully, what exactly it was) and if my yeast needs more friends to get the job done.

Hitch number 1: I read the instructions and the recipe sheet several times and there's still one ambiguity regarding the corn sugar. The kit comes with 8oz in two 4oz bags. The listing specifically says that none of the kits from MoreBeer come with priming sugar, so I reasoned that all the grain/sugar/extract/hops from the kit was meant for the boil on brew day. The instructions call out not adding the 4oz bag of corn sugar (singular) but they're also really generic and not specific to the specific kit. I got 5oz of priming sugar when I ordered, so I know that what the store page thought was my priming sugar is still safely in the bag. Did I over-sugar my wort?

Hitch (blessing?) number 2: I got a high gravity yeast. I happened to have chosen a yeast that supposedly wants a sweeter wort to make a higher ABV, but I don't want to overwhelm them. I even gave them extra nutrients.

The whole thing is a standard 5-gallon, partial boil that I cooled fairly quickly considering I had no chiller. My OG was 1.111 at around 70-72º (so maybe a bit more) and this was the temperature I pitched at. That OG is after bringing the cooled partial boil wort up to 5 gallons again with filtered water.

So now that we're coming up on 24 hours (I'll start expecting the airlock to be moving tomorrow), should I order some backup yeast in case it gets stuck? Also, any insight into the corn sugar content of the kit and now my wort is appreciated. I also asked on the product page.

 

[doug293cz]

No way your OG was 1.111 given that list of ingredients. If the kit used dry malt extract (DME) the gravity would be at about 1.070 for 5 gal, and with liquid malt extract (LME) the gravity would be about 1.059. These estimates include the 8 oz of corn sugar. It's likely that you didn't mix the top up water sufficiently, and pulled your hydro sample from the more concentrated portion of the wort. Net is, you should be ok with the yeast you have.

The corn sugar was intended to be put into the wort prior to fermentation. That is made clear by the recipe description on the web site.

Brew on

 

[Tobor_8thMan]

Holy Jesus 1.111. This must be before adding clean water to make 5 gallons (otherwise known as a concentrated brew)!

 

[Daniel B]

Hadn't considered not mixing it well as the potential cause. That's actually pretty obvious now that I think about it. I was being paranoid about sanitation and topping up with the lid on (from a sanitary vessel through the stopper hole). I have a generous friend with a spare chiller, so I'll be doing full boils in the future. And yeah, I was doing LME. 7lbs.

How did you calculate the estimated OG? Seems like a useful way to cross-check my results in the future.

Also, thanks for the speedy responses!

 

[Tobor_8thMan]

Hadn't considered not mixing it well as the potential cause. That's actually pretty obvious now that I think about it. I was being paranoid about sanitation and topping up with the lid on (from a sanitary vessel through the stopper hole). I have a generous friend with a spare chiller, so I'll be doing full boils in the future. And yeah, I was doing LME. 7lbs.

How did you calculate the estimated OG? Seems like a useful way to cross-check my results in the future.

Also, thanks for the speedy responses!

"How did you calculate the estimated OG?" Use brewing software, estimate or take a hydrometer reading (calibrated for the hydrometer).

Glad to provide input. Believe it or not, we've all probably had the initial same question/concern (no matter how long ago)

 

[doug293cz]

Hadn't considered not mixing it well as the potential cause. That's actually pretty obvious now that I think about it. I was being paranoid about sanitation and topping up with the lid on (from a sanitary vessel through the stopper hole). I have a generous friend with a spare chiller, so I'll be doing full boils in the future. And yeah, I was doing LME. 7lbs.

How did you calculate the estimated OG? Seems like a useful way to cross-check my results in the future.

Also, thanks for the speedy responses!

Estimating OG's is a standard part of recipe formulation. The easiest way to do this is based on the "Gravity Point" method. In this method each fermentable has an experimentally measured gravity potential, which is expressed as a specific gravity value. The gravity potential represents the specific gravity you would get if you used one pound of the ingredient to make up one gallon of wort. Note that this is not the same as mixing one pound of the ingredient with one gallon of water, which would produce more than one gallon of wort (since the sugar adds some volume to the wort, in addition to the volume of the water) which would then have a lower SG than the stated potential.

To get the points from the SG potential, you just take the second and third digits after the decimal point of the SG value. Thus a potential of 1.037 would equate to 37 gravity points per pound of ingredient. Gravity points are usually talked about as "points per pound per gallon" or "ppg", but more correctly they are points per pound for ingredients, and when the sugar is in the wort, they are points per gallon.

To calculate the estimated OG, you add up all the gravity points from the ingredients, and then divide the total points by the volume of the wort, and convert the points back to an SG value. Let's do the example for your recipe (I'll use the potential values from the BeerSmith database):

Potentials:

1.036 or 36 pts/lb for ultra light LME
1.046 or 46 pts/lb for corn sugar
1.034 or 34 pts/lb for Carapils (will reduce by 50% since not mashing)
1.036 or 36 pts/lb for CaraMunich (will reduce by 50% since not mashing)
1.030 or 30 pts/lb for Special B​

Gravity Points for each ingredient:

7 * 36 = 252 for ultra light LME
0.5 * 46 = 23 for corn sugar
0.5 * 0.5 * 34 = 8.5 for Carapils
0,25 * 0.5 * 36 = 4.5 for CaraMunich
0.25 * 30 = 7.5 for Special B​

Total points = 252 + 23 + 8.5 + 4.5 + 7.5 = 295.5
​

If we put 295.5 pts worth of fermentables into 5 gal of wort, the pts/gal works out to 295.5 pts / 5 gal = 59.1 pts/gal for an OG of 1.059.

Things get a little more complicated when doing all grain because you don't get all of the potential sugar into the final wort. You always lose some sugar because some of the wort is absorbed in the spent grain bed (these are lauter losses, which are quantified as lauter efficiency), and you often lose some of the potential sugar because you don't get 100% conversion of the starch into sugar (quantified by conversion efficiency.) Mash efficiency quantifies the percentage of the potential sugar in the grain bill that you actually end up with in your boil kettle. Mash efficiency equals conversion efficiency times lauter efficiency.

When doing extract brewing "mash" efficiency is 100% because it all ends up in the BK. Steeping grains complicate things because the potentials assume that the grains are mashed to convert starch to sugar, but steeping only gives some of the effect of mashing, so your mash efficiency for the steeped grains is low. Roasted grains (like Special B) are a little different, since the roasting process pre-converts most of the starch to sugar, so little if any additional conversion occurs in a mash.

The yields for the steeping grains I used in the example above are, at best, an educated guess. The good news is that the steeping grains represent less than 10% of the total fermentables, so the errors in their potentials are reduced by a factor of 10 in the overall potential.

Brew on

 

[Daniel B]

@doug293cz, you've singlehandedly generated multiple entries in my browser bookmarks! ‍:bow:

Also, I did notice a lot of fluctuation in the volume of the wort during boiling. Between the loss to the steeped grains (which, as you say, would be a lot more for several pounds of mash) and the loss to evaporation/boiling, it seems like there's a lot of potential variables (even just boiling with the lid on).

I'm going to stick with extract+steeped grains for now and try to get the technique down (like stirring the wort before taking a measurement).

Thanks for all the pointers, looking forward to my first strange concoction in 4 weeks.

 

[Jag75]

Estimating OG's is a standard part of recipe formulation. The easiest way to do this is based on the "Gravity Point" method. In this method each fermentable has an experimentally measured gravity potential, which is expressed as a specific gravity value. The gravity potential represents the specific gravity you would get if you used one pound of the ingredient to make up one gallon of wort. Note that this is not the same as mixing one pound of the ingredient with one gallon of water, which would produce more than one gallon of wort (since the sugar adds some volume to the wort, in addition to the volume of the water) which would then have a lower SG than the stated potential.

To get the points from the SG potential, you just take the second and third digits after the decimal point of the SG value. Thus a potential of 1.037 would equate to 37 gravity points per pound of ingredient. Gravity points are usually talked about as "points per pound per gallon" or "ppg", but more correctly they are points per pound for ingredients, and when the sugar is in the wort, they are points per gallon.

To calculate the estimated OG, you add up all the gravity points from the ingredients, and then divide the total points by the volume of the wort, and convert the points back to an SG value. Let's do the example for your recipe (I'll use the potential values from the BeerSmith database):

Potentials:

1.036 or 36 pts/lb for ultra light LME
1.046 or 46 pts/lb for corn sugar
1.034 or 34 pts/lb for Carapils (will reduce by 50% since not mashing)
1.036 or 36 pts/lb for CaraMunich (will reduce by 50% since not mashing)
1.030 or 30 pts/lb for Special B​

Gravity Points for each ingredient:

7 * 36 = 252 for ultra light LME
0.5 * 46 = 23 for corn sugar
0.5 * 0.5 * 34 = 8.5 for Carapils
0,25 * 0.5 * 36 = 4.5 for CaraMunich
0.25 * 30 = 7.5 for Special B​

Total points = 252 + 23 + 8.5 + 4.5 + 7.5 = 295.5​

If we put 295.5 pts worth of fermentables into 5 gal of wort, the pts/gal works out to 295.5 pts / 5 gal = 59.1 pts/gal for an OG of 1.059.

Things get a little more complicated when doing all grain because you don't get all of the potential sugar into the final wort. You always lose some sugar because some of the wort is absorbed in the spent grain bed (these are lauter losses, which are quantified as lauter efficiency), and you often lose some of the potential sugar because you don't get 100% conversion of the starch into sugar (quantified by conversion efficiency.) Mash efficiency quantifies the percentage of the potential sugar in the grain bill that you actually end up with in your boil kettle. Mash efficiency equals conversion efficiency times lauter efficiency.

When doing extract brewing "mash" efficiency is 100% because it all ends up in the BK. Steeping grains complicate things because the potentials assume that the grains are mashed to convert starch to sugar, but steeping only gives some of the effect of mashing, so your mash efficiency for the steeped grains is low. Roasted grains (like Special B) are a little different, since the roasting process pre-converts most of the starch to sugar, so little if any additional conversion occurs in a mash.

The yields for the steeping grains I used in the example above are, at best, an educated guess. The good news is that the steeping grains represent less than 10% of the total fermentables, so the errors in their potentials are reduced by a factor of 10 in the overall potential.

Brew on

Dang ! That's what I'm talking about

 

[doug293cz]

Thanks for the compliments. People finding what I write helpful makes it worth writing.

Brew on

 

[Jag75]

Thanks for the compliments. People finding what I write helpful makes it worth writing.

Brew on

Awesome man ! That's what makes this forum amazing imo.

 

[olie]

How did you calculate the estimated OG? Seems like a useful way to cross-check my results in the future.

I use Brewer's Friend; they have a ton of calculators for everything (and more are freely available on the internetz), though it seems ABV is the one I use most.

Here's a list.

https://www.brewersfriend.com/stats/

I think you want the extract OG/FG calculator. Somewhere (I think it was BF!), I saw a whole-recipe calculator, where you put in LBs grain + extract + batch size and it tells you the expected OG, though I didn't see it in a 10 sec scroll through the list.

 

[Daniel B]

So we tried the beer last weekend and it was good, well carbonated after 2 weeks of sitting in the bottle. Wanted to close out this thread's topic with the results:

Final Gravity during bottling was 1.010, so based on the 1.059 from @doug293cz (and the 1.055 estimated on the kit), it's somewhere between high 5% and low 6%.

Tomorrow some experiments are going into their carboys (Ghost pepper IPA and a rose water ale), but the fact that this turned out is really satisfying.

 

[Tobor_8thMan]

Based on the OG and FG, if they were adjusted for hydrometer temp, you have 6.5% ABV and 5.1% ABW (ABV = Alcohol by Volume and ABW = Alcohol by Weight). Normally, beer we purchase uses ABV.

Beer looks very good. Wish we lived closer and we could exchange homebrew. I'd stop in the middle of the street like most do now days, holding up traffic, while we do the exchange.

 

[ncbrewer]

I'm going to stick with extract+steeped grains for now and try to get the technique down (like stirring the wort before taking a measurement).

With extract batches, I stopped taking an OG reading years ago. The OG prediction is plenty close enough to use for my purposes - probably more accurate than stirring and taking a sample. And it involves less handling of the wort/beer.