Help to work out total liquor for first AG?

[Monkeybrew]

Hi

I am getting ever closer to AG#1 and am trying to get my head around my 'Total Liquor' amount

Is there a common formula for losses to leaf & pellet hops and also per kg of grain used?

My first recipe will use a total of 50g of leaf hops and 3.893kg of grain in a 23L brew.

Cheers

MB

[paulg]

download some free software like brewmate and input your recipe .It will work out you requirements for you,use 10 % loss per hour boiling you won t be too far out.

[darkonnis]

Aye brew mate is there or thereabouts but knowing the theory here will help you check what it comes out with is correct as it isn't always.
I work backwards:

I want 23L in the fermenter.
Deadspace(measure this and change the 2) +2L
Losses to hops & trub is about 1.5L per 100g hops (so as a minimum) +1.5L
I take boil losses of (i suspect 10%) so +2.3L
---29L (or so) into the boiler (pre-boil)

I am mashing with 4kg of malt +6L (1.5L per kg grain)
Mashtun deadspace (again, measure this) +1.5L
--- +7.5L
My HLT has a deadspace of 0L (i tip the damn thing when im almost finished sparging)

So all in, 37L, thats how much water you need there or there abouts. You might come up higher/lower on the first one but dont worry about it. Whats important is that you take plenty of notes and if you can, measure input/output at each stage. This will help you tune your recipes to your kit and avoid you missing your OG targets in future batches. Once you get a feel for your kit you can literally brew on the fly and make good beer without any precise measurement. Of course, more precision = more repeatability *shrug* If you are massively under your target OG to the point you aren't happy (<3.8% for example) you can boil it a bit longer to concentrate it but be aware you may need to adjust your hop schedule.
Hope that helps

Cooky

[Monkeybrew]

Cheers for the input

[guypettigrew]

What cooky says is absolutely spot on.

OR--you could wing it a bit!

Beer Engine (a wonderful tool) tells me 3.893kg of grain (weird amount!) will need 9.7 litres of mash liquor and total liquor of 32.2 litres. In other words, 22.5 litres of sparge liquor or, if you want to stop the sparge earlier, top up to the 32.2 litre mark in the boiler.

This is then where it gets a bit vague.

You'll lose some in the boil and some in the hops as you run off.

No worries. Just top up to 23 litres once it's in the FV.

Or take the OG of the wort which runs out of the boiler and add water to get to your desired gravity. This may or may not give you 23 litres. Doesn't matter, though. You can brew some more next week if you think you're going to run out!

Personally, getting 23 litres is important for me. I sacrifice a degree or two of gravity to get the length. No idea why, it's just what I do!

Rest assured, though, whatever you do in terms of volume and OG, it will taste great. Once you've done an all grain brew you won't ever want to brew any other way.

Have a good brew day.

Guy

[orlando]

BeerSmith is really excellent when it comes to this. It takes a couple of brews to fine tune your equipment profile but when you have it is incredibly accurate.

[far9410]

Aye brew mate is there or thereabouts but knowing the theory here will help you check what it comes out with is correct as it isn't always.
I work backwards:

I want 23L in the fermenter.
Deadspace(measure this and change the 2) +2L
Losses to hops & trub is about 1.5L per 100g hops (so as a minimum) +1.5L
I take boil losses of (i suspect 10%) so +2.3L
---29L (or so) into the boiler (pre-boil)

I am mashing with 4kg of malt +6L (1.5L per kg grain)
Mashtun deadspace (again, measure this) +1.5L
--- +7.5L
My HLT has a deadspace of 0L (i tip the damn thing when im almost finished sparging)

So all in, 37L, thats how much water you need there or there abouts. You might come up higher/lower on the first one but dont worry about it. Whats important is that you take plenty of notes and if you can, measure input/output at each stage. This will help you tune your recipes to your kit and avoid you missing your OG targets in future batches. Once you get a feel for your kit you can literally brew on the fly and make good beer without any precise measurement. Of course, more precision = more repeatability *shrug* If you are massively under your target OG to the point you aren't happy (<3.8% for example) you can boil it a bit longer to concentrate it but be aware you may need to adjust your hop schedule.
Hope that helps

Cooky

+1

[guypettigrew]

I am mashing with 4kg of malt +6L (1.5L per kg grain)
Cooky

Hi Cooky

1.5 litres per kilo of grain? Does this work? I always use 2.5 litres per kilo as in Graham Wheeler's 'Beer Engine'.

Or have I misunderstood?

Guy

[darkonnis]

misunderstood mate.
That does work, but I suspect your mash will be very thick and your efficiency could suffer for it. The formula (if you dare call it that) is so you can work out the total amount of water required.

Realistically you can go from about 1.5 - 5L per KG grain to form your initial mash without much change from the studies I've read.

If you use 2.5L/kg and it works just fine. don't change it! Plenty of other things to try and accidently break, if you have a winner keep it
Cooky

[Blackjack]

My own way, and others may have better alternatives, is to...

First ignore calculations for total mash liquor. The reasons are a.) I cannot get my head round it and b.) I found some of the standard assumptions wrong in my situation. c.) most people like me do not have a huge HLT and so it must be refilled during the mash and sparge which mucks up the volume calculation.

So I just have lots of water heating up to the right temp. in the HLT. I just top it up while the mash is on and add a little while sparging.

The standard ratio for mashing is indeed 2.5lt of liquor to 1 Kg of grain. But John Palmer suggests this can be up to 4 lt of liquor. And using something approaching this has not harmed my conversion and extraction. And so I am pretty flexible on how much liquor for mashing.

I run off the mash into a 10 lt bucket and so have a good measure of the volume of wort I am collecting. I also know that in my 9 gal setup I will lose from boiling right through to the end when I rack off about 11 or 12 lts for various reasons ( hop absorption/boil off/yeast trub etc) and so I aim to collect 54 lts into the copper after sparging. When I did 5 gal brews I always aimed to collect 31 lts.

So after mashing at about 3 to 1 ratio I collect off a 7.5KG grain bill say 14lts and then I do two batch sparges,( adding liquor till it is 6 lts higher in the mash tun) and collect 20 lts off each and I am done. hey presto.
Works for me.

[Monkeybrew]

BeerSmith is really excellent when it comes to this. It takes a couple of brews to fine tune your equipment profile but when you have it is incredibly accurate.

I downloaded the free trial version, but need some time to get my head around it. Looks like a powerful tool though.

It seems that everyone uses different methods with good results, so I'll do my best with AG#1 and fine tune as I go.

Cheers

MB

[Matt12398]

+1 to Beersmith. It's a wonderful piece of software and my brews have come out near enough exactly as it says each time. It takes a bit of getting your head around but you can quickly pick it up and it makes recipe formulation easy.