I’ve not brewed before and yesterday, my wife and I went straight in for our first all grain brew.
The recipe was very similar to Jims tutorial one except I used 3.0kg of pale and 0.5kg of crystal as that was convenient as that was the sizes of the packets. I used the beer engine calculator to figure out how much extra sugar to add to make it up to about 4.4% from around 3.8%. So all is good and it’s just starting to froth in the fermenting bin.
I took a reading on the hydrometer just as we were tapping it into the bin from the boiler and it was 1051 and this seemed too high. I only had about 17 litres in the bin though after tapping and so I used the “dilution calculator†to work out I needed to add about 3 litres to get it where it needed to be. I used boiled and cooled water and added this to the bin. The yeast had already been in there about an hour or so and hopefully will be ok.
When I went back to the beer engine, in the “results†panel (top right), it says Total Liquor = 31.8 litres required to make 23 litres of final produce. I presume this figure of 31.8 accounts for all the various losses?
Jims tutorial said mash with 2.8g which is what I did but he didn’t say how much to sparge with, so I went for 3g thinking that gives me about a gallon in hand to cover the losses but it wasn’t enough. With hindsight, this was about 1 gallon short given the 31.8 litres beer engine says. However, I would have had trouble getting this amount in the boiler.
So I know I needed to get 31.8 litres in somewhere, and the method I happened to use (but was the only option available to me at that stage) was to add pre-boiled water to the fermenting bin at the end. This was actually quite good as it allowed me to add just the 3 litres I needed to take me to the gravity I wanted and I ended up then with 20 litres instead of 23 after efficiency loses (mine was only about 74.3%). I seemed to lose loads in the hops, I cooled it fast and had used irish moss towards the end of the boil, and my understanding with those two is that they can cause a load of sludge to form in the bottom of the boiler mixed in with the spent hops so I must have lost about 2 litres there at least. By the time I've lost another litre or so in sludge at the bottom of the fermenting bin when i syphon it off, and then another litre in the barrel there will hardly be anything left
Does all the above make sense? Is my understanding of the Total Liquor correct? What other choices could I have taken, could I have sparged with more or added boiling water to the boil to keep it topped up? Any other tips would be great.
Cheers
Spencer
