Brew day summary

Well, we've got lots to talk about lately, surrounding mash efficiency and assumptions in calculations. To that end, we'll start with the last brew #29.

We had some weird issues with fermentation, in that neither produced a krausen. The environment was 55°F, which is obviously out of optimal range but still high enough to get the yeast going. Sure enough, there was airlock activity, but the lack of a krausen had us concerned that maybe something besides the yeast had taken a hold. Still, we saw no pellicle that would indicate infection. Hmm...



Anyways we cracked open the two fermenters. The one with WLP037 smelled and tasted great. FG was 1.012, so clearly the yeast had done some work. Unfortunately, the one with WLP005 didn't fare so well. It had a FG of 1.010, but it smelled and tasted sour. Uh-oh, infected. Rather sadly, we poured it down the drain. Oh well, that's the cost of doing business, I suppose.

Beyond that, I did some thinking with regard to what numbers to use when calculating OG and such for a grain bill, specifically the amount of water absorbed by the grist. I'd always assumed a 0.20 gal/lb of grain, but I'm thinking that was far too high with the BIAB method, since we squeezed a lot of wort out of the bags. If I used around 0.10, our efficiency would go up into the 80-90% range.

SO. With that in mind, for our next brew (which actually occurred this past Saturday 4/18/15), we weighed the grain after we were done with it, knowing the original weight to be 19.75lbs. The weight after squeezing all the wort out was 23lbs, indicating 3.25lbs of water soaked into the grains. This represents 0.40 gallons, which translates to a water absorption ration of 0.02! This difference of an entire order of magnitude greatly affects our final numbers! As a result, our gravity was much higher than expected and actually outside of style guidelines. Oh well, first world problems, I guess.

Also possibly affecting our increased gravity is the fact that we purchased our very own grain mill, the Cereal Killer. We changed up the roller distance a bit during milling, so we didn't have a very consistent crush. We do, however, know where we'd like them set for next time.

Woohoo, our very own 50lb sack of grain!

Since we acquired our own mill, we also decided it would be prudent to get our own grain! So we bought a 50lb bag of Briess 2-row, which should last us a few brews. Mmmm so good.

Well, apart from all this, brew day went pretty well. We're (finally) beginning to look at mash gravity and pH, and we also made our own yeast starters for the first time.

Oh yeah! I made a stir plate!

Go yeast go! Pretty awesome.

Anways, now we wait (again) and hem and haw and plan for next brew day.

Later!