Pepper Cream Ale

[mapex]

Hey guys, last night I took my first stab at a complete all grain brew. After my mash and boil I put into primary and took an initial gravity reading and it was much lowet than expected. It was 1.031...I was expecting somewhere around the 1.050 mark.

My brew was still abit warm when I took the reading, my question is will the higher temp have that big of an effect or did I just not get as much of the sugars out of my grains as I could/should have?

any help would be greatly appreciated.

Mike

 

[JonK331]

The wort will become very slightly more dense when it cools but not that much. It is perfectly normal to get low efficiency on your first all grain. Next time, double check all your temps. and check the flow rate on the sparge. Did you batch or fly sparge?

 

[mapex]

I did a complete batch, 65 mins Mash then a 70 Min boil, the problem I ran into was that I created 2 mash pots since my pots wouldn't hold the full mash water with grains so I split into 2 equal mash batches that i did at the same time with near the same mount of care and stirring, just done on different sources. Would that have an effect? I pitched yeast like normal and its churning like crazy in there which to me means there is plenty of sugars for the Yeasties to play with

It looks and smells great so far, I was just kinda shocked by the low gravity to start. I was expecting a bit higher. So maybe I just need to get a larger mash pot and then try it again!!!

 

[JonK331]

Also check the temperature at the beginning and at the end of the mash. This will tell you how much temp you are losing and whether you may need to insulate a little better. If you lose a lot of temperature and drop below say 140, you will get less conversion which means lower SG. Also, when you sparge, you want a flow rate of ~0.25 gpm. It seems painfully slow but that's the best rate to get maximum efficiency. If you go too fast, you will lower efficiency and get a lower SG.