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Where did the beer go?
Just finished bottling an APA and found that when finished I only ended up with about 1 3/4 cases as apposed to the 2 1/2 that I should have.
5 gallons = 640 ounces
640/12 = 53
53/24 = 2.2
So I should have about 2 1/4 cases of beer at the end but Im only left with 1 3/4. Anyone else have this problem? The only thing I can think of is the water lost due to evaporation during the boil but that seems like an awful lot of water to be lost.
Well first, are you sure you ended with exactly 5 gallons in the kettle at the end of the boil?
The missing beer has probably gone to trub, beer left over in the carboy from racking, hop absorption, etc. It doesn't take long to realize 5 gallons in the kettle doesn't equal 5 gallons of final volume.
What most people do, myself included, is to formulate your recipes for a larger volume so that you end up with at least 5 gallons in the end. I set my recipes for 6 gallons so I can leave beer with break material and hop sludge in my kettle and at the bottom of my carboy when I rack. It leaves me some wiggle room and I usually end up with over 5 gallons in the end.
If you boiled longer than an hour, you could easily have lost more than a gallon.
The guys I usually brew with seem to prefer boiling ~7 gallons so they have a good 5 after boil and loss to trub.
The wort also "shrinks" when it cools. 5 gallons of boiling wort is about 4.6-4.7 gallons after cooled. My first 2-3 beers were "kit" beers, and I too wondered. Once I moved up to 10 gallon batches, and this phenomenon of "missing" beer became exaggerated, I started doing 12 gallon, then 13 gallon batches. Now I start with 15 gallons to boil, after 90 minutes I am left with 13 gallons, then cooled 12.5 gallons. I lose about 1 gallon in hoses and trub and kettle loss, so 11.5 makes it into 2 fermenters 5.75 gallons each. After blowoff, and leaving some behind in transfer to keep the beer clear, I am able to get 5-5.25 gallons of clear beer to my kegs, or in your case 2 1/4 cases of bottles.
So as FPB suggested, if you want your yield to be true, then you need to recalculate your recipe to alllow for procedural loss (and cooling shrinkage!)
I knew of the evaporation and such but never realized how many other factors contribute to the loss of water.
I currently don't have a very elaborate setup, just a brew bucket and carboy as secondary so I wont lose much to hoses and everything so my question now is this: I usually start with a 3 gallon boil, then after everything is added Ill pour the wort into 2 gallons of cold. If I use this 3 gallon boil and say I lose a gallon to evaporation, trub, etc I should be good to add the remainder to 3 gallons of water instead of 2 to make up for the loss? Hopefully that makes sense.
cave12man wrote:
If I use this 3 gallon boil and say I lose a gallon to evaporation, trub, etc I should be good to add the remainder to 3 gallons of water instead of 2 to make up for the loss? Hopefully that makes sense.
Correct but you'll need to scale your recipes up from 5 to 6 gallons. Not a big deal but for example, 6 pounds of extra light dry extract in a 5 gallon batch yields a SG of 1.052. By increasing your batch size to 6 gallons that 1.052 becomes 1.044. So multiply the amounts in your recipes by 1.2 (6/5=1.2). To achieve that 1.052 SG in a 6 gallon batch you would need 7.2 pounds of extra light dry extract.
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