My first attempt at a BIAB. I used the following:
5.25 lbs of 2 Row
.25 lb of Crystal 40
.25lb of White Wheat Malt
.25 of CaraPils
I started with 2 gallons of water as my strike water. Got it up to about 170, dropped to about 160-155 during the mash. I rinsed the grains with another gallon and a half of water at 170. So my boil started with 3.5 gallons.
…5 ounce of chinook at 60 mins
.25 oz of Cascade at 30
.5 oz of Cascade at 15
.125 oz of apollo at 5
.125 oz of amarillo at 5
At the end of 60 mins I turned off the heat and put the wort in the fermenter after cooling it down to about 80 degrees. I ended up with only 1.5 gallons of finished wort. Stupid me, I added another gallon of water to bring me up to volume. I measured the gravity at that time, and I was at 1.040. A bit low I think. But, since I am already in it, I put the yeast in, S05, gave it a little agitation, put on the airlock and off it went into the closet. Will check temps in the closet, but I have seen it between 65 and 70ish.
Next Saturday, I will add the following:
.125 oz of oak chips in fermenter
.5 oz of centennial in fermenter
.125 oz of apollo in fermenter
.125 oz of amarillo in fermenter
Then let it go another week and bottle, and shelve for another 4 or 5 weeks.
With what I wrote, am I in for yet another disappointing brew day? I sure hope not, but I think I screwed the pooch on this one. I did not think I would boil off so much water in 60 mins, but I did. Next time, we go with 4.5 gallons in the boil and go from there. How could I have upped the gravity while adding water to what was the finished boil? I am holding my hopes that this will at least taste good. I don’t much care about ABV, but I do care about the taste and what my methods were here. Any input would be much appreciated
You learned a lot from this brew. See it thru and see what you think. Keep notes for incremental improvement. My thoughts:
170°F strike and sparge, 155-160°F mash are all a little hot IMO. I like to mash ~152°F. Supposedly high mash temp will leave a sweeter, fuller beer and lower temps produce a dryer, crisp beer. I personally doubt I could tell a beer mashed at 150°F to one mashed at 160°F but I like to strike low and raise to final mash temp vs come in hot and let it cool to mash temp. That could be personal preference but certain enzymes are destroyed at certain temps. Striking in low and raising to mash temp is my way of attempting to preserve those enzymes.
Temp control during the mash is an age old problem. Some use direct fire to maintain temp, others wrap in blankets or sleeping bags, while others use Recirculating Infusion Mash System or Heat Exchange Re-circulating Mash System, and I’ve even seen a Sous Vide used to control mash temp. You’ll figure out what works for you but think about how you can keep that temp drop to a minimum.
Boil off can be controlled by turning down the heat or using less time. You don’t need a volcano. A gentle rolling boil is all that is required and is considered more desirable. Also, there’s no rule a 60 minute boil is required. You’ll have to adjust your recipe for higher or lower boil off rates, longer or shorter boil times.
You could have added some sugar to increase OG when you topped up to hit an OG target. Brown Sugar, Demerara, Turbinado, Cane, Golden Syrup, pancake syrup, Karo, etc. you can get at Walmart. Beet, Corn, Candi Syrup, DME, LME you may have to get at a brew shop. You can make invert sugar. Sugars can be a feature of the recipe and different sugars are said to bring a difference in the beer. Many famous beers use sugar in the recipe.
I’d try to cool the wort a little closer to the mfr suggested range before pitching yeast. 80°F is a little high for US-05 IMO. Without fermentation temp control you might try Kveik.
From this point I think you can avoid some detriment. Fermentation temp and O2 pickup will affect taste:
Waiting to dry hop then letting it sit a week might not be the best idea. I imagine US-05 is going to rip thru that wort at ambient closet temps in ~3-4 days. If you open the fermenter after that you are going to introduce O2. Even letting it sit after fermentation is complete can (and probably will) begin to introduce O2. While there is active, healthy debate whether hot side O2 plays a significant role in oxidation, there is absolutely no debate on whether cold side O2 exposure will oxidize a beer. It will. To what extent, how fast, and if it matters to the consumer is another debate. I have seen ingenious methods of dry hopping without opening the fermenter but that’s a whole new can of worms. My advice: once yeast has consumed the sugars and go dormant, keep the beer cold and away from O2. I would dry hop during active fermentation so the yeast will consume any O2 introduced. Once fermentation is complete package the beer (with as little O2 pickup as possible), let it referment in the bottle, then keep it cold.
Controlling fermentation temp is going to improve your beer IMO. I get it you’re just starting out and on a budget but there are things you can do. High fermentation temps can produce certain flavors that could be undesirable. You could do everything else right but let fermentation get hot and produce some off flavors. Fermentation is exothermic meaning it will produce heat. I wouldn’t be surprised to see 10°F or more higher than ambient. Planning on that by using a tub of water with towels wrapped around the fermenter and a fan blowing across it (swamp cooler) is probably the cheapest I can think of. Try to keep the liquid temp within the range for the yeast. In this case, with US-05 I’d shoot for ~65°F. Adding ice to the water can help. There are other ingenious ways to control fermentation temps cheaply.
I hope these thoughts help. If you do make a mistake don’t waste it, learn from it.
All good stuff from Brewbama.
I noticed that you said you started with 2 gallons of water and rinsed the grain (sparge) with 1.5 gallons then stated “so my boil started with 3.5 gallons”. That can’t be correct, you assumed 3.5 gallons but you didn’t account for grain absorption. The malt absorbs a pint or more of water beer pound so you probably lost at least 3/4 gallon there and started the boil with around 2.75 gallons. As BB sad you will learn a lot from this brew and that’s a big one.
Do you have a cellar? Cellars are often a very good, and very steady temperature for fermenting. In the dead of winter my cellar is a bit too cold but I can use a seedling mat and wrap it in a blanket to get the temp just right. I prefer this to the fluctuating temps upstairs.
Also if you are shooting for a certain end volume of finished beer you need to account for what you lose to break material in the boil and trub in the fermenter. A starting point might be a quart in the kettle and two quarts of trub so .75 gallons.
As for your gravity situation you may simply need more malt in your recipe for the efficiency of your system. Just keep brewing with theses factors in mind and take notes.
First time BIAB (or any AG method) sure can feel intimidating, it was for me, I felt like I was making a series of mistakes at every step. I hope you have an enjoyable beer out of this, but even if you’re disappointed, don’t despair. (My first BIAB with all those mistakes surprised me at being better than expected.)
+1 to everything BrewBama said. Like him, I too like to start the mash low and raise mash-temp from there, usually targeting ~150 (I strike at about 159 to get there) but I’m good with an initial mashtemp from 145 to 152, then at about 20 minutes I’ll add hotter water (or drain off a bit and heat that) hoping to get to at least 152-155, and let it rest there for awhile. I mash in an Igloo thermos, so it took me about 3 tries to figure out how much my strike water cools. Every “mistake” gave me a data point to do a better job next time.
ETA: My point being, you had a really high mash temp to start out the mash; it may not ferment down as low as the TG you’re wanting. If your FG is way higher than you wanted and it ends up being too sweet, that could well be from the strike temperature being so high.
BTW, have you used oak chips in the fermenter in previous brews? Maybe consider not doing that this time, so that if there’s something wrong with the beer, you have fewer potential reasons to figure out. Honestly, I have been disappointed with every beer I’ve used oak chips in - maybe I’m doing it wrong - but I don’t think I’ll use them anymore. I did some split batches where I dryhopped after primary in separate secondaries, some with just the dry hops and some with the same dry hops + oakchips, and invariably, the oak chips batch was worse than the simple dry hop batch. I’d hate for you to come out with a nice, decent beer but you don’t know it because the oak chips ruin it and then you second guess everything else you think you did wrong… that’s just me, but consider maybe reducing the number of potential weak links until you know whether the beer was otherwise great.
I hope you have a good one. Got my fingers crossed for you.
(( Next Saturday, I will add the following:
.125 oz of oak chips in fermenter
.5 oz of centennial in fermenter
.125 oz of apollo in fermenter
.125 oz of amarillo in fermenter ))
Too many moving parts for your first BIAB, in my opinion.
+1 on BrewBama, lots of good stuff there. Red, I have been enjoying all your posts. You sure have been brewing a lot, it’s nice to see your dedication to the art. I suggest you brew the exact recipe again and try to iron out all (or at least some) of the points of contention. Not that this first attempt will taste bad, but I guarantee the next batch will taste better. Then do it again, and again.
I found that restraint was the hardest part of homebrewing. There are just so many styles and flavors and combinations to try, all the while trying to hammer out a system that works for you.
Thanks for all the input guys, great advice for sure. I am going to take it all in, wait for the end product and see what I got. Who knows, it could be a great beer and I am just being way to over the top. LOL. I appreciate you all taking the time to help me out. I am still learning, and I think this one is the first of many lessons to be learned. I will update as I go along. RR
In regards to dry hopping, if I am understanding you correctly, I should maybe dry hop after 2 or 3 days instead of waiting a week? Let the dry hops sit a few more days and then bottle and cool? Sorry if I am not understanding you, but I really am hoping this hobby will work out, but I am getting a bit frustrated.
Also, this should be my last time putting my fermenter in the closet. My hope is, once my keg is done, I am going to try and extend the door out so that I can set the bucket in the kegerator. Then, get a temp controller and set the temp to whatever the yeast is asking for. Once that happens, my fermentation temp will be a bit more steady I hope.
All great advice and I am going to print this and keep it for future reference. Thank you for taking the time to write it up, I appreciate it.
Great thought, and you are right, I did not account for grain absorption. Using the info you provided, that would have put me in the range of what I had to add at the end. That makes a bunch more sense to me as I was thinking I sure lost a lot more in the boil than I had accounted for. Next time, I am going to add about a gallon to either my strike water or my sparge water. Either way, another gallon is going to go in. LOL.
Don’t have a cellar, but the closet I am using is in a part of the house that usually doesn’t see much sun and is cooler for the most part. I am currently trying to figure out a way to add some space to my kegerator and use it as a ferm chamber as well. All part of the learning process I guess. LOL.
Thanks again for the info, I appreciate all input as I am learning a lot from you folks.
There are different ways to rery hop that achieve different results. Personally, I found dry hopping during fermentation was not for me I far prefer the results I get from post fermentation, cold dry hopping for a short time.
Like Denny said there are many ways to skin this cat. Understand: he’s been brewing since Eisenhower was a corporal so he has his processes down pat. He knows what to expect from his actions.
I like to dry hop during active fermentation so the yeast can take up my slack. But I wouldn’t dry hop at all for quite a while when I first started brewing opting only for whirlpool hops. Introducing cold side O2 is a big deal to me. Not so much for others. You can decide where you land on that as you gain experience.
Any new hobby is frustrating at first but as you gain experience it becomes a lot of fun. I think the best advice I ever got was not to take myself too seriously. Mistakes are going to happen. Ingredients will be forgotten. Equipment is going to fail. The key is how to react to those issues. It can ruin your experience or you can laugh it off and never waste a mistake.
Ever play golf? I used to play a lot of golf. It’ll drive you crazy at first. Then, when you finally learn to hit the ball, you can start playing the game. It gets fun when you are focusing on the outcome of where to hit the ball for your best opportunity for the next shot vs just getting it on the club face. You learn what to expect from certain actions. If you hit it in the woods the first thing is to get out of the woods. …and not into another hazard. Learn to break 100, then 90, then 80. Pretty soon you’re having fun. Forget about winning the club championship until you are playing the game.
I would skip dry hopping right now. Fine beer can be produced without dry hopping. There are 2 types of dry hops, active ferment and post ferment. Active ferment dry hops should be added when the yeast is about half way through the available fermentable sugars, and post ferment dry hops is done when the ferment is finished and you are about to cold crash and then keg or bottle. But you can make a spectacular beer without dry hopping. Get to that point first. I just kegged an APA without any dry hops and it tasted really good, and it’s not even carbonated yet.
On your next batch you should measure the gravity and volume before the boil. You can decide at that time whether you need to add sugar or dried malt extract to bump up your gravity. The total amount of sugar remains fixed, although boiloff and dilution will increase or decrease the specific gravity. The easiest way to figure this is to deal wiith gravity points (GP = 1000*(SG-1)). A specific gravity of 1.040 is equal to 40 gravity points. If you have 4 gallons of wort with a specific gravity of 1.040 then the total amount of sugar you have is 40 gravity points times 4 gallons, or 160 gallon-points. If you dilute it to 5 gallons then you would have 160/5 = 32 gravity points or SG=1.032. If you boil it down from 4 to 3 gallons then you would end up with 160/3 = 53.3 points or SG=1.053. If you decide you need to increase the amount of sugar, table sugar has about 46 points per pound per gallon and DME has about 45 points per pound per gallon. If you have 4 gallons of wort and you want to increase the sugar content by 10 gravity points then you would add (10/46) pounds of table sugar per gallon or a total of 4*(10/46) = 0.87 lbs of sugar for the 4 gallons.
Most grains have something like 35-38 points per pound per gallon maximum sugar contribution, and a mash efficiency of between 70 - 90% is respectable. That means that with 6 lbs of grain in a 2.5 gallon batch you should get roughly (636/2.5).80 = 69 gravity points or SG = 1.069. If you ended up with SG = 1.040 then working backwards your mash efficiency was 40/(6*36/2.5) = 0.46 or 46%, which is pretty low. If your mash efficiency is this low next brew, then the most likely culprit is that your grain crush is too coarse. For BIAB you can crush very fine and get good extraction.
Another possibility is that your mash pH is wrong. I know you are in South SF, so you may be using Hetch Hetchy water like me. In that case I know that your mash pH will be way too high with that grain bill. You will need to add some acidulated malt or some phosphoric or lactic acid to improve your efficiency. My rough estimate is that you would have a mash pH of close to 5.8 and would need 3 oz of acidulated malt to bring that down o 5.4.
Wow, great info there. I measured the OG when I put the extra gallon into the fermenter, so maybe the wort that went in was higher before I added the water? I am learning all this so any and all info is very useful. I have already purchased my next recipe, but after that I am going to go back to this one I think and play around with it and see where we go. I have some dry DME that I bought so I have that on hand. I am still hopeful, I went into the closet to make sure the yeast had started doing it’s thing and there is a nice smell of lemon/citrus fruity smell coming from the fermenter, so that is good. I am off next saturday, so maybe I will put it in bottles then, stick it in the fridge and see where I am in a few weeks. I have an empty fridge in my shop that, if the bottles explode, not big deal. LOL. Anyway, I might throw the hops I have in Wednesday morning just to see what they do, but leave out the wood chips. I never quite understood why there were there. Thanks all for the info.
On a side note, how do I check the water I am using? Or is it better to go buy gallon bottles of Alhambra or similar for my next batch?
Your municipal water supplier is required by law to produce a public water quality report, although that only gives averages and ranges for the relevant ions. You could also call your water supplier and ask where the water comes from. You can also get your water tested by Ward Labs (https://www.wardlab.com/). You can purchase pH meters for anything from $10 to $200. Amazon has a bunch of cheap ones.
If you have Hetch Hetchy water it is as good or better than any spring water you can buy at the store, and a hell of a lot cheaper. I can tell you what is in it if you find that is what you have.
You have an empty fridge in your shop? That sounds like a temperature controlled fermentation chamber to me. All you need is the temperature controlled part. You can get an Inkbird ITC-308 on Amazon for $35.