Aaghh, I also had a first all grain brew attempt

[Fred777]

Hi guys, I'm new here.
On Saturday, we (my dear wife and myself) made our first all grain brew attempt, a smoked porter bases on a recipe in The Homebrew Handbook (Dave Law and Beshlie Grimes). I just read through Waylander87's first all grain brew attempt and I had similar feelings, haha.
First of all, we started in the afternoon, not knowing that it would take us until 10 in the evening until we'd pitch the yeast.
The recipe called for 23 litres of water, and in our blind lack of experience, we believed that was the only amount of water we should use. This is how it went:

MASHING
We boiled 10 liters of water to put in the mash tun for 20 minutes in order to get it hot. The water was then run out of the tun, and we added 10 liters of water at 72 degrees. We then slowly added +/- 5 kg of grains to the water and aimed at a sparge temperature of 67/68 degrees.
After 1h30, the temperature was still around 66 degrees, so all good!

SPARGING
Now here's where the trouble started. We had about 13 litter of water left to sparge according to what we understood from the recipe (23 litres - 10 litres in the mash tun), so we slowly started sparging that (a combination of batch and fly sparging, another failure we had) at 80 degrees.
That took forever and I'm quite sure that next time we'll just go for batch sparging, it seems to make more sense and it looks a lot easier. Anyway, I though the level of wort in the boiler was quite low, but having nothing to measure how much was actually in there, I just guessed; 23 litres in = 23 litres out...

BOILING
So the boiler went on the hob and we started boiling it. I followed the recipe with the hops, however I just checked the hops loose in the boiler. I think next time I'll put them in a bag. When we were emptying the boiler in the fermenter, all the hop residue was around the hop strainer at the bottom and it created a mess and not all the liquid went through.

COOLING
I wish someone had told me that cooling takes ages. We have one of these spiral coolers that you put in the boiler, but even with that it took ages. We ended up putting it in a cold bathtub so that the cooling was accelerated.

FERMENTER
After the temperature dropped enough, we transferred it to the fermenter, which has a volume indication, only to discover that we only had 12 litres of wort from our initial 23 litres of water...
Original gravity was 1083 (the recipe predicted 1056) which makes sense since we have less liquid.

My main concern is not that our beer will have a high ABV (duh), I'm more concerned about the fact that we hopped the beer for a 23 litre brew whilst there was only 12 litres in there. This might end up being very bitter...
The beer's been in the fermenter since Saturday night now, it's Monday morning and the activity is very low (not a lot of noise in my airlock). Again here, we added yeast worth of a 23 litre brew, and we also added it when the brew was still 25 degrees...

I wonder how this will end up... I think there are some lessons to be learned here, and I think we should do the same brew all over, but do it right this time.
Thanks for your feedback!

 

[calumscott]

My guess?

You'll have 12l of pretty awesome "big beer". Higher ABV's need higher IBUs as a rule otherwise they become cloyingly sweet.

I'd ferment it out and bottle it in small bottles. It will take a long time to condition though, big and smoked is going to be pretty intense and will take a while to mellow out.

Could start getting good around Christmas time which will be a bonus!

If you are faced with a similar problem post boil in future, you can just add water to bring the gravity back down to around where you wanted it. Ideally you hit the volumes and gravities as you go but adjustments are cool if you need them, you don't lose a great deal of quality in the finished product.

So what to do next...? Get another one on!! :

 

[PD]

and make yourself a dip stick from a length of dowling....then its easy to measure and keep track of your volumes especially going into the boiler. To get 23Lt into the fermenter you will need over 30 litres of wort in your boiler before putting the heat on...

Dont worry it gets easier.....

 

[JimmyB78]

I've got that book and while the recipes look very good I don't think the details were checked particularly well before printing.

The 23L volume thing has been brought up in the reviews on amazon, they never state anywhere what the final volume should be a the end of brewing.

Well worth putting some of the recipes into brewmate or similar software, I put one in and the og etc were nothing like what the book suggested it would be. I then used the software to adjust the recipe to something like what was expected.

 

[Dr Mike]

With an immersion chiller, you can get it to cool faster by providing some agitation/mixing of the wort. I do this by just rocking the chiller itself back and forth in the wort. Like this I usually get it down to the 20s within 30 to 40 minutes (on my first AG when I didn't rock, it took an hour and a half).

As far as water goes, I find I need c37 litres at the start to get 23L of finished wort.

As Callum says, this shouldn't be too bitter. The higher gravity will reduce the hop utilisation and the flavour will need more bitterness to balance out. The brewers of old used to express their hop content as a hop to grain ratio rather than hop to volume ratio so less volume didn't mean less hops for the same amount of grain.

 

[Fred777]

In other words, this might turn out to be amazing, great! Can't wait for Christmas to come then. Would you recommend I transfer it to secondary fermentation before I bottle it, or should I just bottle it when fermentation is done?

 

[PD]

that will open a can of worms for debate.........
Its personal preference...some do...some dont. You decide, there are benefits to both

 

[The Goatreich]

With an immersion chiller, you can get it to cool faster by providing some agitation/mixing of the wort. I do this by just rocking the chiller itself back and forth in the wort. Like this I usually get it down to the 20s within 30 to 40 minutes (on my first AG when I didn't rock, it took an hour and a half).

Similar here, I usually whirlpool the water by gently stirring it so that it is constantly moving against the cooling pipe. It normally gets down to temperature in around half an hour.

 

[Dr Mike]

In other words, this might turn out to be amazing, great! Can't wait for Christmas to come then. Would you recommend I transfer it to secondary fermentation before I bottle it, or should I just bottle it when fermentation is done?

With what is now a strong beer, it is important to be sure the fermentation really has completed before bottling. As the last few points of gravity can be quite slow there is a higher risk of making bottle bombs.

 

[Fred777]

Thanks for the advice guys. To avoid exploding bottles, I might go for the safe bet and do a 2nd fermentation then... I hope I'm not talking nonsense

 

[pittsy]

I've got that book and while the recipes look very good I don't think the details were checked particularly well before printing.

The 23L volume thing has been brought up in the reviews on amazon, they never state anywhere what the final volume should be a the end of brewing.

Well worth putting some of the recipes into brewmate or similar software, I put one in and the og etc were nothing like what the book suggested it would be. I then used the software to adjust the recipe to something like what was expected.

Most likely that book would be in usa 5 gallon , our english 5 gallon is the same as 6.1 usa gallons . You can divide by 18.9 the times by 23 to get the right amount , also check what efficiency is set in the book , it often says near the start ( often set at 75% or 80% )

 

[JimmyB78]

I've got that book and while the recipes look very good I don't think the details were checked particularly well before printing.

The 23L volume thing has been brought up in the reviews on amazon, they never state anywhere what the final volume should be a the end of brewing.

Well worth putting some of the recipes into brewmate or similar software, I put one in and the og etc were nothing like what the book suggested it would be. I then used the software to adjust the recipe to something like what was expected.

Most likely that book would be in usa 5 gallon , our english 5 gallon is the same as 6.1 usa gallons . You can divide by 18.9 the times by 23 to get the right amount , also check what efficiency is set in the book , it often says near the start ( often set at 75% or 80% )

Just had a look and it's definitely just not been checked properly. in the 'How to use these recipes" bit it says water: 23L/5 gallons/6 US Gallons. Some of the recipes are fine, some are way out, so if you have the book i'd suggest putting the recipe into some software to check it first.

However the book does have a large range of nice looking recipes covering most different styles of beer, and some useful bits like a hop substitute chart.

 

[mattrickl06]

I would guess that if you are doing a beer with such a high SG you will need a more resilient "high alcohol" variety

 

[Fred777]

I just installed Brewtarget on my computer; I don't really understand the difference in the following terms:
- target batch size
- calculated batch size
- target boil size
- calculated boil size

It also asks about specifications of your equipment: All Gain Ideal or All Grain 10 gal Igloo cooler

I'm confused, as I don't really understand this software yet.

 

[JimmyB78]

I've just put it into Brewmate and this is what it comes out with.

Recipe Specs
----------------
Batch Size (L):           23.0
Total Grain (kg):         4.874
Total Hops (g):           0.00
Original Gravity (OG):    1.045  (°P): 11.2
Final Gravity (FG):       1.011  (°P): 2.8
Alcohol by Volume (ABV):  4.42 %
Colour (SRM):             21.6   (EBC): 42.5
Bitterness (IBU):         0.0   (Average)
Brewhouse Efficiency (%): 70
Boil Time (Minutes):      60

Grain Bill
----------------
3.106 kg American 2-Row (63.75%)
0.456 kg Caramalt (9.36%)
0.456 kg Oak Smoked Malt (9.36%)
0.342 kg Carapils (Dextrine) (7.01%)
0.228 kg Chocolate (4.67%)
0.228 kg Wheat Malt (4.67%)
0.058 kg Black Malt (1.19%)

Hop Bill
----------------

Misc Bill
----------------

Single step Infusion at 66°C for 60 Minutes.
Fermented at 20°C with

Book states 1056 as the OG, to get to the OG i have to lower the final volume to 18L or up the efficiency to 87%

I just installed Brewtarget on my computer; I don't really understand the difference in the following terms:
- target batch size
- calculated batch size
- target boil size
- calculated boil size

I've not used Brewtarget but I think 'Target' is what you were aiming for (eg 23 Litires batch size) 'Calculated' is what you actually ended up with.

 

[Fred777]

Thanks Jimmy
I just installed Brewmate as well, looks easier than Brewtarget...

 

[Duxuk]

I would be tempted to liquor back, that is add water. If you treated your initial water (campden tab etc. ) then do the same and find the volume you need to add with a calculator. Did you say you ended with 12l @1087? So take 1044 and divide by 56. You get 18.64 so add the extra 6.64l and your OG will be reduced to 1056. This will work exactly the same even after fermentation has started.
I hope the sums are easy to understand. :thumb:

 

[Fred777]

6 days of fermenting and gravity has dropped from 1083 to 1011, almost 9.5% ABV. This will be a winner.

 

[pittsy]

wow 9.5% it may take anywhere from 2 months to a year to be at it's best ( most likely 3 to 4 months) . Sounds like a sipper .

 

[Dr Mike]

Wow. Which yeast is that ?