AG #01 - Watered Down

[Gricey]

Doing my first AG, first brew at all in fact, based on Jims Bitter on the front page and with a lot of help from another forum member
Anyway, as my kit is all new, and I have water problems right now (kitchen being done, so had to run chiller outside) I didn't notice that my hose to the chiller was leaking and running into the boiler.

Long story short I added 3L of water to my post-boil wort, and now my gravity is silly (1.015).

Is there anything I can do? I'm just going to pitch the yeast and stick in my temp-controlled cupboard, but could I sneak some sugar in or something to stop me having to call the beer a slightly misspelled 'Watership Down' ?

Cheers
Gricey.

[trucker5774]

Top advice from Chris as usual As he said ....is there something we are missing, perhaps a misunderstanding on your volume or readings. That would be a very low reading. The only other option I could see would be to boil further until you reach your desired volume. This would hopefully kill of any bugs you may have introduced. If you have hops in the wort remove them so as not to produce an overly bitter beer.

[trucker5774]

The only other option I could see would be to boil further until you reach your desired volume. This would hopefully kill of any bugs you may have introduced. If you have hops in the wort remove them so as not to produce an overly bitter beer.

It would require a reduction of around 13L (assuming a preboil volume of 23L) to take the gravity up to 1035 - that's a lot of boiling for only 10L of beer.

I agree, Chris. It would not be worth it if we are basing it on a normal length brew. Unless I missed it I don't think Gricey gave us a brew length and being his first brew I was "hoping" it may be a short length. I think the principle holds true though for future reference though.

[Gricey]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Basically I had sanitised everything, excluding the chiller hose (food grade) Didnt think the hose would be touching anything, judgement error that I'll correct next time. The water in my HLT was treated (as per the calculator linked here) but obviously the stuff that ran down the outside of the hose wasnt (and probably infected in some way too). I did take care to get everything right, made a couple of small mistakes though (and one big one, going to gt some jubilee clips for that chiller!). I had to manually raise the temp of my strike water as my HLT is fixed at a lower temp, but adding grain to the strike water lowered to the required temp as planned. Batch sparge water may have been a touch lower too, so need to study this HLT.

I know I was pushing it a bit attempting a brew with no downstairs water and late in the evening, but didn't think it would go quite so badly!

FYI it was a standard brew length (22.5l), batch sparged as the fly sparger I bought didn't work.

Not a complete loss for me though, like I said I've never brewed before (no kits, let alone AG), so it has all been a learning experience for me and physically doing the steps gives you a lot more confidence.

I have the mats for a second brew, so I guess I should bin what is in the first FV (or should I let it ferment out of morbid curiosity, it has been in the cupboard 9 hours...) and have another pop next weekend. I will do better with buying some longer hose, I probably could have got away with chilling indoors if I had.

Cheers
Gricey

[Befuddler]

I would just check you quantities and batch sparge technique as my 1017 prediction wasn't too far off the mark. You should manage better than that with the right recipe and applying somewhere near the right techniques.

I don't know what the hell happened here as I did the maths and wrote out a step-by-step guide for him, so I the recipe and technique were definitely right (its the same technique and almost exactly the same equipment I use). The SG should have been 1.040, so even with the hose mishap that would've been 1.035. I'm totally confused as to what went wrong.

[Gricey]

Ive narrowed it down to aliens, sunspots or a broken hydrometer. Or me cocking it up.

[gr_baker]

Just out of interest. What temperature was the wort when you measured the OG? A friend of mine made his first brew and measured at a high temperature not realising that he'd get a much lower than expected reading.

Russell.

[floydmeddler]

Also, how fast did you run off during sparging?

[Gricey]

Just out of interest. What temperature was the wort when you measured the OG? A friend of mine made his first brew and measured at a high temperature not realising that he'd get a much lower than expected reading.

Russell.

19, corrected to 20. Was 1015 corrected.

Gricey

[Gricey]

BTW, I'm leaning toward my water treatment horking the pH, looking into that ATM.

Gricey.

[boingy]

To get such a dramatic shortfall in OG it has to be something fundamental like the mash not working. You just did not convert enough sugars, maybe because of mash time or mash temperature. Here's a left field question: are you sure you put the correct quantity of grain in the mash? It's dead easy to lose count of the kilos when weighing out grain.

[Gricey]

To get such a dramatic shortfall in OG it has to be something fundamental like the mash not working. You just did not convert enough sugars, maybe because of mash time or mash temperature. Here's a left field question: are you sure you put the correct quantity of grain in the mash? It's dead easy to lose count of the kilos when weighing out grain.

Eek, don't say that. I can't have got that wrong, simple recipe @ 3.5kg M/O and 250g crystal, I had 4 x 1kg M/O bags and 1 x 500g bag of crystal, I had half a bag of M/O and half a bag of crystal left...

Malt was 2 weeks old or so, but it keeps for longer? Mash temp only dropped 1deg in 60 mins...

Gricey

[Gricey]

It keeps for a year at least but it does sound like there is something significantly wrong with your methods given such a low gravity. Check what you were doing against the link I posted.

Sorry for not checking that earlier, been at work and did my last reply while on the walk home

So... Ok. Here are my differences from the link you posted:

• Different recipe. 3500g Maris Otter, 250g Crystal, 30g Fuggles@60m, 20g Challenger@60m, 5g Fuggles@10m
• Tried to set the water profile to 'Bitter' based on the liquor calculator on this site and the reports given from Yorkshire Water here.
• pH not adjusted other than doing the water profile stuff above. Having tested the pH in the water left over in the HLT this morning, it read 6.4. That's assuming the salts didn't come out of solution over Sunday to change the value any more. I could give the vessel a shake and take another pH reading, or make up a new batch of water and test that, to make sure I'd not done anything alkalicious with the liquor...
• Sparge water (not strike water, I manually adjusted that to the correct value using boiling water before I doughed in the grain) was 73 degrees rather than 80. I have a thermostatic HLT from Hamstead Brewing Centre, this seems to fix the sparge water at that temp (no adjustable thermostat).
• Rather than lauter into collection vessels I simply ran straight into the boiler once I'd recirculated the jugs from both batches (to the point where the wort runoff was clear)
• I boiled for 60 minutes rather than 90, adding my first hops @ 60 and my late hops / protafloc @ about 13 mins.
• I chilled the wort to 20 degrees rather than 25. I took my SG at that point, though by the time I took the SG the temp was 19 degrees and I temp. corrected it via the spreadsheet in the forum
• While chilling, 3L of raw tap water entered the boiler

[*] Stood for 30 minutes after the chill to allow things to settle.

At that point my SG read 1014 (1015 corrected).

The rest of my steps up to fermenter were the same (aeration, pitching, move to cupboard) though I'm sure they're a bit moot now.

I have photos of the whole process (60, but they're not annotated) up on Flickr if you want to see if I've done anything crazy wrong...

Cheers
Gricey.

[trucker5774]

This might seem like a daft idea, but, the grains were malted and crushed? I have just done a 4100g grain bill and got 1046 which is an unusually high result. I normally have an efficiency of about 80 to 85 %...........that's more like 90%

[Gricey]

This might seem like a daft idea, but, the grains were malted and crushed? I have just done a 4100g grain bill and got 1046 which is an unusually high result. I normally have an efficiency of about 80 to 85 %...........that's more like 90%

Before go round the back and shoot myself ... I must say Ive never seen grain before the stuff I bought ... does it look crushed/malted in this pic?



I have to say it had a 'malty' smell to it ...