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2nd try at all grain
had a big weekend beer-wise. Bottled my first ag batch, Midwest's Copper Ale yesterday, and brewed up my 2nd attempt today. This time I went with MW's Light Aussie Ale, although I'm not sure how light it's gonna be. OG is supposed to be around 1.039, but I ended up with a little less than 5 gallons and an og of 1.050, pitched us-of yeast after getting the wort cooled to below 69* and put it in the fermentation fridge, although I'm not entirely certain the fridge still works. At least it won't get light struck in there. Anyway, happy brewing to all, and enjoy your home-brewed beer!
I guess you don't have to worry about efficiency problems!
Should come out just fine, if not 100% as-expected.
I think Mw's kits are formulated with an expected effeciency of 65%. I might need to cut back on the grains next time as I was trying for a low alcohol beer.
Hogarthe wrote:
I think Mw's kits are formulated with an expected effeciency of 65%. I might need to cut back on the grains next time as I was trying for a low alcohol beer.
Don't bother with cutting back on grains. Get used to brewing the recipe as it is.
If you keep coming in with too high a gravity, just cut it with water until you get to your desired gravity.
Your original post said you were shy of 5 gallons at 1050OG. If you had diluted it to say 5.5 or 6 gallons then you would have had plenty of wort to put into your fermentor, and probably extra such that you could have left behind your break material and hop residues. In fact the kit may actually be made that way.
This is also a great time to be calibrating your method for determining volume in the brew kettle and such.
Well, brewchez beat me to the advice I was gonna give you. If you overshoot your target gravity you can add top off water especially, if you undershoot your volumes.
When I first started brewing ag I used the MW kits too. I had the opposite problem, I seriously undershot my target OG and ended up with a pretty low gravity beer. I started ordering an extra pound of base grain with the kit until I got my system dialed in and I started hitting a couple of points high with just the grains provided with the kit.
While diluting with water can certainly help with the gravity issue it will also mess up the IBUs for that beer. I'm sure we all know that boiling an amount of hops calculated for a wort of a specific gravity in a higher gravity wort will result in lower alpha-acid isomerization and lower IBUs in the final beer. Unfortunately, diluting with water will only accentuate this problem. This out of balance FG and IBU ratio may result in a beer not to your expectations.
The best thing you can do is determine the average extraction efficiency of your system over a few brew sessions and then adjust the grain you use in the mash to bring the gravity down closer to what you expect. Once you get this dialed in you will have better luck with reproducing beers and truly hitting the gravity as well as the IBUs you target. Cheers!
I'm thinking next time mash with 2 qts/lb and I'll have more volume in the kettle, so I should end up with the full 5 gallons and be close to the correct og. I used 1.5 qts/lb this time.
I use a 1.5qt/lb grist ratio and like it. Not too thick, not too thin. If you need to increase your preboil volume you can increase your grist ratio, use more sparge water or maybe turn back the throttle on your propane burner to reduce your evaporation rate.
yeah, I think my evaporation rate is fairly high, because the brew pot is very wide. It's the 15 gallon commercial quality kettle from Midwest, biggest pot I've ever personally seen, lol. Using 1.5 qts/lb has seemed to work good for mashing so far, so I guess I'll stick with that, and try adding an extra gallon of sparge water. I can also try dialing back the burner, although I didn't have it set at max after I got the wort boiling.
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