help missed og

[BIGJOHN]

so heres the deal i have been extract brewing for bout a year now and decided to go all grain. so i quit buying lme and saved my pennys and got my self i AG set up. decided i would convert my recipe for my wee heavy and i missed my og by 22 points should have been around 1.072 and i hit 1.050, and i did a 12 gallon batch ( i know i know stupid of me but i thought it would go better). any way i had

25 lbs. American 2-row
2.5 lb. carapils malt
1 lb. smoked malt
1 lb. melanoidin malt
1 lb. roasted barley
1 lb. mild malt

mashed @ 157 for an hour used 10 gallon ((31.5 lbs x 1.25)/4+9.84375 gal.) then i sparged 10 gallons @ 170 at this point i had to break out a turkey fryer. turns out you cant boil 15 gallons in a 15 gallon pot. so i did 5 gal in one 10 in the other boiled for an hour put what was then around 13.75 gallons in my 15 gallon pot and chilled the wort to 70 deg. this is when i started crying my wee heavy which at a min. has an og of 1.070 is now at 1.050 and about 10 srms too dark. where did i go wrong. also i left 1.75 gal in my kettle as i only had two 6 gallon car boys? thanks in advance

 

[jaycount]

It would have been tough to take a preboil gravity since the runnings were separated into two pots... assuming you didnt mix them before splitting them. If we had the pre-boil OG we would know what your efficiency was before the boil (and before that 1.75gal of loss)

Bottom line here, your biggest problem is not boiling the batch down enough. The longer you boil, the more WATER (and water only) gets evap'd, the lower your volume gets, the higher your OG gets. You should've boiled off that 1.75 gallons instead of dumping it, there was plenty of precious sugar in that wort.

You need to plan for the right amount of boil off and either only sparge enough water to get you to your batch volume + boil off volume OR if you sparge over that you need to boil longer (and adjust your hop schedule)

 

[BIGJOHN]

after my mash i put all of the wort into my keggle but had no head space left so i put 5 gal into another pot. i did not think to take a preboil gravity reading. i thought i might have sparged with too much but thats less then the .5 gallon per pound rule. in hind sight i should have boiled down. how do i figure efficiency? also i plan on repeating this catastrophe next Friday any advice?

 

[jaycount]

I figure efficiency through Beersmith, I'm not a mathemagician so I don't know the manual way to do it.

If you take a preboil SG, make sure all of your runnings are well mixed. Your 1st runnings will be higher gravity than the 2nd and so on so if you split the batch into separate pots because of boil size then that'll make it fairly difficult to make an accurate pre-boil SG.

I just sparge up to my boil volume, I don't get as good of efficiency this way but it saves me sparge time and boil time, so I just factor that into my efficiency and adjust recipes around it.

If you are going to do a longer boil make sure you add the hops in relation to the end of the boil or else you will end up with more IBUs than the recipe calls for (i.e. if you are going to have to do a 90 min boil to get down to your batch volume but your hop schedule starts @ 60 minutes, make sure you wait until the 60 minute mark!).

 

[TopherM]

Yup, you had a 12 gallon recipe and ended up with 13.75 gallons post-boil. If you had boiled until it was 12 gallons, you would have hit your recipe OG, but you effectively took the recipe and added 1.75 gallons of extra water, watering down your OG with it.

Should still be a good beer, so don't sweat it at this point, another lesson learned for next batch.

 

[BIGJOHN]

thanks guys now that i learned my lesson or at least one of them, i am going to bump this down to a ten gallon batch i really thought 12 gallons was doable in a keggle guess not. and i also think i will try to mash out. but when i mash out should i empty the wort off my mash and then add my mash out water? or just mix it into the orig mash? also when i sparge can i sparge with lets say 100 gallons of water and just stop collecting run off when i hit my boil volume? or will that affect my efficiency?

 

[TopherM]

Mash out is just heating up the mash to a higher temp (usually 170) for about 10-20 minutes. This step does increase efficiency. You would keep your original strike/mash water in there and just put the whole thing back on heat until it reached 170.

I think (hope) that must be a typo when you say you are going to sparge with 100 gallons of water. I think you are missing the concept. Efficiency is how close you get to extracting 100% of the available sugars from your grain. The idea is to have it as concentrated as possible, so basically to use as little water as possible to hit the desired OG. Most recipes assume a 72-75% efficiency. If your efficiency is lower, you are going to end up using less water to compensate, and just have a lower final volume yield. If your efficiency is higher, you might use more water to compensate, or just be happy with the higher OG and higher ABV down the road!

(THE FOLLOWING ARE HYPOTHETICAL NUMBERS, YOU HAVE TO CALCULATE THESE BASED ON YOUR PERSONAL EQUIPMENT) If you make a 10 gallon batch, your original strike water can be anything, as long as it is enough to cover the grains. So let's say you mash with 8 gallons.

Your initial water volume is going to be your batch size PLUS your grain absorption PLUS your boil off rate. For my equipment for a 10 gallon batch, I would mash with about 8 gallons of water and sparge with about 5 more gallons. So that's 13 gallons MINUS about 1.4 gallons lost to grain absorption in a typical 20 lbs grain bill. So that's then 11.6 gallons, and my pot boils off about 1.5 gallons per hour, so post-boil, I'd end up with 10 gallons of wort. Again, this is just an example, though. There are lots of factors that are dependent on your equipment.

If you want an easy way to do all of this, get BeerSmith 2.0 software. You can put in the custom dimensions of your equipment, grain bill, and brew process, and the program automatically calculates the water volumes and additions throughout the process. It makes all of these calculations, as well as pretty much all of the calculations in the brew process, pretty brainless. $22.00 at Birdman Brewing is the best deal going right now.

Good luck!

 

[BIGJOHN]

100 gallons was an exaggeration i just keep reading all this info about how my grain bed should always be under 1-2 inches of water & that i should stir my bed during my sparge (which i know i should not do) so i didnt know if i should sparge with a def calc amount or just put some water in and bring it up to 170 and get my total boil amount. but you have answered all of my questions thank you Topherm. i now realize i just needed to boil down my wort and use less sparge water next time.