Gravity too low

[davidabcd]

Yeah I was wrong.

I was really hoping you were right. It would have made sense. Oh, well.
I like taking NB recipes and buying the ingredients, the logic being that they already tested the recipe. Their Dragon Silk (spin on Dragon's Milk) came out especially well.

 

[bracconiere]

Curious how this works, Google is not being very helpful. My wife has been thinking of getting a refractometer for work, it would be interesting to compare in a few weeks.

if you get a refrac that reads BRIX, ethanol raises the reading and lowers a hydrometer.....so comparing the two will give you a pretty good estimate of ABV, and what the OG was....a refrac reading of 6.5 BRIX would be like 1.026 for a FG, but assuming it has alchol, and a hydrometer is reading 1.008...you can use a calculator that's programed by someone smarter then me to get an idea about all this...

edit: third one down on this....


https://www.northernbrewer.com/pages/refractometer-calculator
wish i knew about it 10 years ago when i was trying to figure out how much alcohol i was making in my sake attempts....being you add rice gradually....way better method then the vintometer i bought!

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

@GrowleyMonster : I'm finding that NB extract kit instructions change slowly over the years. This one specifies a concentrated boil (1/2 the water and all the extract at the start of the boil) but doesn't mention secondary fermentation in the step-by-step instructions. Others are (or were) partial boil with late extract additions.

 

[jerrylotto]

Back to fermentation temperature for a second. You said "70" but that was probably the ROOM temperature. While that influences fermentation you are really interested in your WORT temperature. Figure out a way to get a thermormeter to measure your wort temp. The stick on strips work well with plastic fermenters. FYI, fermentation is initially pretty exothermic. In a 70 room you could easily have a 80 degree wort temperature for a few days.

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

i learned a neat new trick last year. when it's done fermenting, if you have both a refractometer, and hydrometer. you can tell what the OG actually was after the fact.....

Curious how this works, Google is not being very helpful. My wife has been thinking of getting a refractometer for work, it would be interesting to compare in a few weeks.

calculator here: "Approximate ABV and Original Gravity from current Brix and Gravity converter" (link).

equations here: "Calculating ABV without OG" (link).

IIRC, the equations are from a magazine article (probably Zymurgy, maybe BYO) from mid-2010s.

 

[mathiascote]

Back to fermentation temperature for a second. You said "70" but that was probably the ROOM temperature. While that influences fermentation you are really interested in your WORT temperature. Figure out a way to get a thermormeter to measure your wort temp. The stick on strips work well with plastic fermenters. FYI, fermentation is initially pretty exothermic. In a 70 room you could easily have a 80 degree wort temperature for a few days.

Hmm, okay so let me make sure I've got this right. The yeast says ideal range is 59-75, which made me think 70ish room would be fine. But in actuality, I want the wort itself more on the low end, like 60-65. And because of the heat it's generating, the ambient temperature would need to be more like 50-55? Which realistically means not relying on the ambient temperature, but doing an occasional ice bath or something and babysitting the temperature, at least for a few days.

 

[RM-MN]

But in actuality, I want the wort itself more on the low end, like 60-65. And because of the heat it's generating, the ambient temperature would need to be more like 50-55?

i find that starting the wort cooler than the recommended temp and allowing it to come to the low end of its range within a day works well. If I let my beer ferment in a room that is 62 ambient, I notice that my beer is likely at about 64-65, right in the middle of its range. Starting at 72, I might get my beer temp up to near 80 at the peak of fermentation because the yeast work so much faster at that warmer starting temp that they can drive the beer temp up higher.

 

[IslandLizard]

This one specifies a concentrated boil (1/2 the water and all the extract at the start of the boil) [...] Others are (or were) partial boil with late extract additions.

Thanks for pointing that out.
Sadly, there's little rhyme or reason to their instructions. They've always been, and still are, confusing, misleading, or sheer wrong.

 

[BrewnWKopperKat]

Thanks for pointing that out.

 

[Mexibilly]

Hey all,

I'm pretty new to this. I am trying to make the Northern Brewer's West Coast Radical Red extract kit. You can see the recipe here for reference.

I thought everything went well, but I was disappointed at the end when I measured the gravity at only 1.026, vs the recipe's expected 1.054. That seems like a pretty big discrepancy to me.

I am trying to figure out where I went wrong, I have a few guesses but maybe someone here can help me say for sure.

• On the grain steeping step, I found their instructions ambiguous, "steep for 20 minutes or until water reaches 170f". I think they meant to steep as the water was warming... I ended up steeping for 20 minutes at 140, as someone told me that was a good steeping temperature. Should I have done it at 170 for 20 minutes? Or increased to 170 at the end?
• I tossed in a whirfloc tablet 15 minutes before the boil ended, because I figured it couldn't hurt anything... but maybe it did?
• At the end of the boil, there wasn't really much in the way of sludge at the bottom, so I went ahead and put the whole kettle into the fermenter.
• I did go a little over 5 gallons, maybe like 5 1/3, to hopefully end up with 5 gallons drinkable without the trub. I'm sure that lowered the gravity somewhat, but surely not that much.

One other question, should I consider adding some corn sugar while it's still fermenting, to try to compensate?

Once post-boil temp comes down to <80, I rack to a 6.5 gallon bucket and pour back & forth between that and another sanitized bucket 3 or 4 times to aerate. If you have multiple buckets you could get your volume right then pour back & forth, aerating and mixing any top off water thoroughly for an accurate reading.
On this one I'd assume an OG of 1.045-1.050 due to your volume issues and continue learning & improving every time.

 

[jerrylotto]

Hmm, okay so let me make sure I've got this right. The yeast says ideal range is 59-75, which made me think 70ish room would be fine. But in actuality, I want the wort itself more on the low end, like 60-65. And because of the heat it's generating, the ambient temperature would need to be more like 50-55? Which realistically means not relying on the ambient temperature, but doing an occasional ice bath or something and babysitting the temperature, at least for a few days.

Ambient temperature is going to cool or heat your wort differently depending on air flow, fermenter material, shape and surface area. The only way to know is to measure the wort temperature directly.

I used to float my plastic conical in a water bath (plastic garbage can) for the first couple of days to get better heat transfer capacity until I built my fermentation chamber. Now, I have a chest freezer powered through an Inkbird controller that takes it's temperature control from a thermowell in the conical There is also an oil pan heater in the chest freezer that is connected to the warm side of the controller output and a computer fan that runs full time in there circulating the air. I spliced an auto electrical connector inline on the 10K NTC temperature probe and picked up some spares so I can swap things in and out of the chamber for fermenting anything from kveik ales to lagers or storage.