Questions before for the first 1 gallon all grain brew

[jaroporter]

hey,

most people use around 2,5L / kg water to mash with, then the rest to rinse the grains until you have enough to boil with. you suggest you ended up with more after the boil than expected, so note the volume you lost in evaporation to the boil and use that next time to calculate your total liquor. beer engine will probably have it's own defaults for these values (that sounds like it was higher than what you got in reality) but you have to edit them to suit your sytem. initially, take volume and gravity readings at every point in the process and it'll help you to finetune it.

you can increase OG by boiling longer and therefore concentrating the wort, but if you've already added hops then the longer boil will extract more bitterness from them.
another option would be to add sugar or malt extract, like using a kit beer, but personally i'd only use a small amount to increase a small percentage of gravity, not to get from 1,020 to 1,058

if you're getting really surprising gravity readings, it's also worth checking that your method (hydrometer or refrctometer) for taking them is sound.

can't help with a grain mill but buying say, 5 brews worth of crushed grain from the same source would be a decent way initially to eliminate that as an issue while you work all the other parts out.

still, sounds like you made beer and best of luck for the next go!

[burrowsbrewery]

New thread for 2nd Brew
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=69093

[daddies-beer-factory]

My first brew day

Mistakes:-
1. Bought half as much pale malt as I should have done, ended up halving everything.
2. Should have boiled water the night before it took forever.
3. The mash tun was undersized; it wouldn’t have done a full batch anyway.
3. If I want to crush my own grain I should really get a proper crusher, bashing it didn’t work, the food processor either dusted it or left it whole.
4. This lead to terrible efficiency, OG 1.020 should be 1.058!
5. The biggest problem was that I realised I didn’t really know how much water to use for the mash. I used beer engine to scale down a book recipe from 19l to 4.54l by fixing OG and EBC. It gives two figures Total Liquor 7.9l, mash liquor 2.9l.

I just filled the mash tun. After the 90 min boil I ended up more than the half measure I expected, no doubt contributing to the weakness.

On a plus note it’s the right colour, fermenting and smelling ok. This next time I will buy the right amount of CRUSHED grain and change mash tun or go BIAB.

Questions:-
How much water do I mash with to get the expected OG?
Am I right in saying I can only decrease OG by watering down and not increase it when i cock up?
Where can I get a good but cheap grain crusher?

Hi Burrows brewery,
quick answer to your questions
you use about 2 - 2.5 Litres of water / KG
You can increase OG by adding Cane sugar half way thru the boil (say about 50g / gallon to give it a small boost) not beet sugar

for a grain crusher , dont know try the home brew shop , ebay, malt miller, mrlard, other homebrew equipment suppliers are available !