I came up with 10.73 gallons of water needed, call it 10.75. Using a mash thickness of 1.5 I used 6 gallons for strike water and 4.75 for the sparge. (Batch size was set at 6.25 gallons, 16 pounds of grain, everything else left alone)
I ended up getting 4.5 gallons of first runnings, added another 3.5 gallons from sparging giving me 8 into the boil kettle.
This seemed ok because I figured a gallon or so for boil off, another half for trub loss getting me back to the 6.5 gallon figure.
The confusing part is that the total amount of wort produced was 9.5 gallons total (another 1.5 than I needed, which I dumped).
Okay, it seems like your figuring was right, but you didn’t get the absorption that you were supposed to. How was your crush? Did you have a lot of uncrushed kernals? How was your efficiency? That might lead you to where things went wrong.
I think that your decision not to use the extra wort was a good one. Did your gravity end up where you wanted it?
Crush seemed fine, not sure what my efficiency is yet! I posted this elsewhere, but ended up with 1.065 vs. 1.060 that the recipe called for (post boil OG).
something doesnt make sense. you say you used 10.75 gals water, and collected 8 gals wort. how did you come up with 9.5 gals collected
edit: you collected 8 gallons from 10.75 gals water…that’s about .17 gal/lb loss to grain absorbtion and dead space.
8 gals collected with 14% loss per hour for boil would leave you about -1gal or 7gal post boil. subtract .5 gal for trub loss and you have 6.5 gals in the fermenter.
So, a total of 2.7ish gallons of loss subtracted from the 6 gallons used to strike = 3.3 gallons of mash runoff. Add 4.75 gallons to sparge, it doesn’t seem like much more than 8 gallons got into his kettle. Except he says he collected 9.5 gallons. :o
EDIT - I realize I’m rephrasing what you said. Just trying to piece this together in my mind !
exactly…something needs to be reconciled here. either he collected 8 gals or 9.5…if its the later, he may have used more water than called for (by accident) or topped off.
I wonder if he uses a calibrated stick, or if the 8 and 9.5 are WAGs. Yet he says he dumped 1.5 , kept 8 and was .005 OVER his target OG. I think my brain hurts.
16 lbs of grain is a ton, so even if he did use more water by accident (leaning this way) he very well could have had higher OG with decent extraction.
Let me re-type what I initially said in clearer terms…
-16 pounds of grain.
-I came up with 10.73 gallons of water needed, call it 10.75 using one of the online calcs.
-Mash thickness was 1.5, 6 gallons of water for strike, 4.75 for the sparge.
-4.5 gallons of first runnings
-5 gallons of sparge runnings (not sure what to call this)
-Total of 9.5 gallons of wort produced
-I only needed 8, so I didn’t use 1.5 gallons at all
My thoughts are he used the whole grain bill, and the recipe calls for a 6.25 batch. If he mashed and sparge with proper levels for the 16 pounds when he was only making a 5G batch, that would explain part of the OG overage. But like you Noth said: how much did you collect, what was the preboil, how long did you boil, how much into fermenter. If these were answered earlier, I missed them
Yeah, combined with inaccurate volumes, I guess I could see it. Wow, think I need a beer. Drink a beer while figuring out brewing issues - circle of life.
I know it seems odd. I swear I didn’t have a beer until mid-way though the boil! Breaking it down, the 4.5 gallons of first runnings seems reasonable from the 6 gallons of strike right?
The second (mystery) part is that I added 4.75 gallons for the sparge, and got 4.5 from that. I guess that’s not too unbelievable as the grain had already done all the absorbing it was going to do.
I’m not too worried, just curious if this had something to do with my OG numbers. Like I mentioned earlier, I’m already planning my next brew (a very repeatable SN Pale Ale) that I can nail down.
+1. I can’t see how 6 gallons minus absorption on 16 lbs plus dead space = 4.5 gallons of first runnings. Seemed like it should’ve netted more like 3.3.
