2 newbie Questions re. alcohol content

[beermumster]

Hello all

so, I am new to making beer. We have aquired, randomly, a 20L Braumeister machine. It's a bit like a breadmaker for making beer. Put everything in, press some buttons, and it all comes out nice at the end. We've made a couple of random brews which lead me to these specific questions right now:

We have a refractometer, that measures the sugar (alcohol?) on the Brix scale. Before pitching the yeast, on the pale ale we have just brewed, the refractometer gave us a reading of 11.2 Can I get an idea of how much alcohol will be in the final beer, from this? How would I calculate the alcohol from this?

As the water level drops during the boiling process, do I just top up the water to keep it at about 20l? Is this going to just dilute my alcohol content? I ask, because the first brew we made, when we started with 23l of water, we somehow ended up with only 12l of beer (lost to the boil, the trub (?) etc) and we hadn't topped up the water at all, and the second brew we kept the water level topped up religiously to 23l, and then somehow did an alcohol content calculation (using something on the internet... I can't remember what) after 2nd fermentation and only had about 2.5% alcohol...

I hope someone understands and can help!

 

[periolus]

A brix readig of 11.2 gives you a specific gravity of roughly 1.045. The overall ABV will presumably depend on the yeast you use and the efficiency of the process that your machine uses.

I think you will have trouble using a refractometer at the end of the brew, because you need to apply a special formula to calculate readings where there is alcohol in the test solution. You would be better off using a hydromter at the end to give you a rough idea, but calibrate it first by taking a reading in water at 20C. Apply any error margin to your final gravity reading. For example, my hydrometer reads 0.998 in water at 20C, so I have to correct readings accordingly by adding 0.002.

I hope this helps!

 

[jinxy72]

hi .. the brewmaster is a great machine and fully automated making it easy :lol: but you will have losses depending on the recipe etc .... i use the brew in a bag method (similar to the brewmaster but using one big pan) and allow extra water

e.g

grain 4kg ( i allow 1 ltr per kg so 4ltr added for absorbing into grain)
evaporation (for 90 min boil i allow 4ltrs - this has been worked out over time so i know it works for me)
batch size 23ltrs

total water = 31 ltrs used.

this is just an example and its system dependant .. 3v systems can have extra dead space etc ( i dont )

using this above you shouldnt be far off ... now u wont get all ur water into the brewmaster (prob?) so add to 20L ( or to max) add the grain then add the remaining water after you take the grain out (pre-boil).. try it a couple of times and adjust the water to suit u :thumb:

 

[beermumster]

Great, thanks for the answers. I think we'll use the hydrometer to test the SG after fermentation then.

 

[jinxy72]

have u tried the brewmaster since m8 ? interested in how u get on with it as thinking of getting one myself