1st AG Brew - What did I do wrong?

[st3w4rt]

Brupaks London Bitter

3845g of grain
9.6 Litres of water + 4 Litres for dead space = 14 Ltrs (rounded-up)

Took strike water up to 79.7 Degrees.
Put 1.5 Litres of water boiled in kettle into coolbox to pre-heat then disposed of it.
Emptied strike water in to coolbox and then doughed in the grains.
Mash temp 68 Degrees.
Let the mash sit for 90 mins.
Mash temp after 90 mins 66 Degrees.
Sparged for 45 minutes.
Stopped sparging when the runnings reached 10.00 (10.10 temp corrected).
Only collected 19 Litres of wort.
Boiled for 90 minutes.
Added the hops for the full boil.
Gravity reading of 10.46 (10.57 temp corrected).
34 minutes of cooling with coil chiller to 21.5 Degrees.
Transferred to fermenting bucket - ended up with only 14 Litres!!!
Dry yeast pitched into wort.
Fermented at 20 Degrees for 1 week in temperature controlled fridge.
Transferred to secondary where it has been for the last 2 weeks at 20 Degrees.

Tomorrow I plan to take a gravity reading to determine the %ABV.
Dissolve some sugar - not sure how much, into some wort.
Then move everything into my barrel for 3 weeks. Also will do a couple of bottles.

 

[dennisking]

What was the expected OG and the expected final volume.

 

[st3w4rt]

1038 and 40 pints

 

[joe1002]

Sounds like you needed to sparge for longer/with more liquor.

Typically, for 23l in the fv I need about 27-29l pre boil, depending what weight of hops I use

 

[jonewer]

3845g of grain
9.6 Litres of water + 4 Litres for dead space = 14 Ltrs (rounded-up)

Not sure if I understand, but to mash I calculate the weight of grain x 2.5. So for a 5kg grain bill, I would use 12.5l of water in the mash tun. I would then plan on losing 1l of wort for every 1kg of grain. I dont measure the gravity of the wort as it runs but I usually collect about 22l which I add to the 10l or so remaining in the boiler.

Depending on your set up and hop schedule, you would need around 30l of wort as a pre-boil volume (I need 32l for a 100g hop schedule)

 

[st3w4rt]

I put 14 Ltr of water in my boiler, took it up to the strike temp then transferred 10 Ltr into my mash tun. 2.5 * grain bill. 2.5*3.845=9.6.
Then I filled my boiler up to the brim and took up to 82 degrees to use for sparge water.
I stopped sparging at 1.010 as Graham Wheeler told me to in "Brew your own British Real Ale".

 

[biggtime]

1038 and 40 pints

If you were aiming for OG of 1038, and ended up with 1057 instead, wouldn't you just add water to both bring down the OG and increase the volume? That's what I do...

 

[st3w4rt]

Yes, probably... but I didn't think of that at the time. This is my first all grain brew.
I'd really like to know why it happened rather than just add water.

 

[biggtime]

I'm pretty new to AG myself, but from what I've heard/read, the loss of water/liquor/wort during the process is a fairly natural by-product of the grains absorbing some of it, the hops absorbing some of it, and the boil evaporating some of it. Topping up with cold water to reach the desired OG after boiling seems to be fairly standard practice. But I now mash with a little more liqour than usually quoted, and sparge with plenty, and aim to have more than 23 litres in the boiler at the start of the boil if my target volume is also 23 litres. Some will then get lost in the boil, but you're likely to find the gravity is above the target after the boil, and then just top up to achieve the right volume and gravity. Although other, more experienced, brewers may have better suggestions...

 

[biggtime]

To give an example Stewart, I've brewed today (a nice Golden Ale, with Challenger and Northdown hops, post boil with some Goldings), and the wort is cooling at the moment - down to about 30 degrees C so took a quick reading with hydrometer. Gravity is currently 1062, traget gravity is 1046. I'm also well short of the hoped for 5 gallons at the moment (I can tell, just by looking) so it's clear that to get closer to both the target gravity and target volume I will need to add some additional water to the FV, and keep checking the gravity until I'm in the right place - and hope that also gets me close to the right volume too.

 

[Dave1970]

You stopped sparging too soon

I've always used Brewstew's guide which says you sparge to 0.990 which temp corrects to 1.008. For a mashout temp of 76C I actually get .990 correcting to 1014 so you might even get away with going lower than 0.990.

Either way you could have sparged for longer and collected a higher volume of lower SG wort. You can of course dilute your wort (use the topup calculators on the calculators link top right) but you would be diluting flavour as well as SG so there's a limit to how far you might want to do this

 

[Rolfster]

Its can be a bit of a trial and error process!

As others have said you lose water to grain absorption, evaporation and hop retention, as well as dead space in various vessels.

I use a free program called brewmate to work out how much water I need for the mash and sparge.
You can build recipes and it works out International bittering units (IBU), what you would expect your original and final gravities to be and stuff like that.

I had a couple of brews that were a bit shorter than expected. I added hop tea to them to bulk them out a bit and reduce the %, with out losing flavour. :thumb:

R

 

[craigite]

Many of the points above match what I do when I brew.
We do need to limit the amount of sparge water; I stop around 1.014, or when a finger sample is loosing the lovely sweet taste. Ok, if we keep sparging we will get more sugars, but we will also get undesired compounds. I generaly only sparge with between 10 and 15 litres.
However I need about 28litres pre-boil volume for a 90min boil, so I top up my boiler with the necessary volume of water from my hot liquer tank before the boil. That way I do not mess up my hop utilisation calculations.