Wait for all yeast to fall to bottom before bottling?

[IslandLizard]

OG was 1.070, I should haved used more water than the recipe stated to start, and/or added water for the boil I think = lessons learned.

1.070 is more than 50% higher, but after adding water it's pretty much all the same.

With all grain brewing, getting the right volumes is important, it will take few times to get that more predictable. I think I mentioned before, boil off is more kettle/heat source related than batch size related. IOW, boil off volume with 20 liters can be close to boil off with only 10 liters, which can be close to boil off with a mere 5 liters. Using a boil off percentage is looking at it the wrong way, or inaccurate at best.

Batch sparging:
Grain => add strike water + stir => mash => stir => vorlauf + lauter => add sparge water + stir => vorlauf + lauter. Repeat last 2 steps if splitting sparge into 2.

You're aiming at getting just the right pre-boil volume and gravity. Then after boiling off a known amount, will yield your target post boil volume at the desired gravity. No top up water should be needed. If you get all those within 10% you're doing well.

 

[deeve007]

I waited 3 days, gravity reading hadn't changed so chose to bottle. Bottling was far from great, I didn't fully test all the equipment with water before using, so my bad and further lessons learnt...

Ended up with around 6 litres of beer, which means I had around 7 when taking into account the crap at the bottom you need to leave. I wrote earlier that I had messed up water amounts... but I guess this also illustrated another reason to do 20L rather than 10L brews, the amount you lose at the bottom of the fermenter is probably not double for 20L, so you probably get a higher ratio of usable beer.

Anyway, lessons learnt, lessons learnt... hoping the beer is drinkable, at whatever mystery ABV it is (somewhere between 2.6 and 5 ), and I'll aim to improve on my next brew.

Appreciate once again the help from everyone.

 

[Cavpilot2000]

If you wait for ALL yeast to fall out, it won't carbonate.