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brew day review help

Post #1 made 11 years ago
by monkeyman
I have been working on an American Amber Ale. This is version 3. It is basically the BCS recipe with Special B in place of the Crystal 120. The predicted pre boil gravity was 1.041. I ended up with 1.047 so I added 1200 ml of RO water to the sweet liquor prior to the boil. That dropped the gravity to 1.044 ( I wanted to add more but was out of RO water). The OG ended up pretty close to the predicted 1.052 ( 1.051 as best as I could tell with my equipment). My question is, how do I put my final readings into the BIABacus. I (hopefully) have attached the BIABacus and what I have put in so far from my actual measurements. Thanks for the help.
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Post #2 made 11 years ago
by Lumpy5oh
You can put your gravities into section M
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Post #4 made 11 years ago
by PistolPatch
Hey there monkeyman ;),

If the BIABacus doesn't allow for something, there is usually a good reason. Here's the reasons in this case...

- You can't trust a single reading on a single brew.
- Evaporation can change significantly from day to day.

Therefore, despite what you might hear elsewhere, you should not be adjusting your brew pre-boil. In stead you should have some boiled tap water that you can use to dilute at pitching if necessary and usually it will be necessary if you have things set up right. In other words, you should set your BIABacus up so that the evaporation is at your lowest likely level so as you are always in a situation of having to dilute your gravity rather than raise it.

When you added the water, you didn't change the amount of sugar in the wort. In other words, multiply the volume x gravity before you diluted and after and you would end up with the same number.

I would enter in your numbers after you diluted as this will give you a proper evaporation figure for that one brew. You would need to put a note though somewhere visible saying you diluted (and not to do it again :lol: ).

:peace:
PP
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Post #5 made 11 years ago
by majorphill
Monkeyman

I quite often have an outlying gravity reading whilst I am brewing. I ignore them until the final reading and then say "I have no idea what caused that" and then have a beer. Sometimes that initial reading continues through and more often than not, corrects it self.

Looking at your numbers I see that your mash volume was exactly as predicted but your actual VIB was too large by 13%. That is, you recovered more water from your mash than was predicted.

Could it be that your mash volume was in error ??

If you enter your VIB gravity into section M as Lumpy5oh suggests you will see that your EIB is 104%. You apppear to have extracted more sugars from the grain than existed.

Could it be that you started with more grain than than you thought you had ??

This is were I get confused

Basically, at the boil stage you, ended up with too much water and too much sugar.

You then added more water to lower the gravity reading, but still remained too high.

Moving onto the VIF figure you ended up wit 22% more beer at the correct gravity.

The only way to end with too much, that I know of, is to start with too much and I don't see how you could do that when you only had 13mm of headspace when you mashed in.

Are you sure of those kettle dimensions ??

To get that amount of beer at that gravity, your pot needs to be larger

So to answer your question I don't think there is a correction you can make to meaningfully show your water addition.

Maybe you should just say "I have no idea what caused that" and then have a beer.

Post #6 made 11 years ago
by monkeyman
Now I'm confused ( as opposed to my normal confusion :think: ). I set the evaporation rate based off of my last 5 brews and that was the lowest estimate. Today for some reason my pre boil gravity was higher than predicted ( 1.047 as opposed to 1.041). So I got the bright idea to add more water to dilute the wort to get a lower gravity. Should I have left it alone? At this rate I will never be able to grab the pebble from your hand (Kung fu reference) :sneak:

Post #7 made 11 years ago
by majorphill
Monkey man,

I would take PP's advice and leave it alone

"Take heart. From the accomplishment of PP, the work of many years. One small piece. Now another, and another, and another." (Kung fu reference)

Post #9 made 11 years ago
by PistolPatch
Lol major. (Btw, excellent posts again yesterday in that other thread :thumbs:)

Mr Monkey, it certainly can be confusing! Not sire if you had a listen to the Basic Brewing Podcast that Bob and I did a few weeks back but some of the points made there are relevant here. In fact, in that I talk about not doing pre-boil corrections.

Many home brewers are lead to believe that brews are repeatable whereas they are not. Even commercial breweries have to make adjustments on every single batch. Now...

For a start that 1.047 reading could have been inaccurate as we mentioned above. But let's say it was correct. (Your EAW is within a few percent so it was probably fairly close - see attached file). But let's imagine though that the volume or gravity reading you took was incorrect and that your evaporation on that day was much lower than normal. You would end up with a weak, watery wort which means either adding DME or putting up with a weaker brew. (The latter option in this case is usually preferable IMO).

If you leave your brews alone until end of boil, you can firstly have a double-check on your readings which is a must because once again you can still have difficulty getting inaccurate ambient wort gravity readings as well. Evaporation has passed by and you now know where you stand.

The BIABAcus efficiency default is actually set a little low we hop so that you end up with a stronger wort than predicted. Later as you get more numbers up your sleeve and know your lowest evaporation rate, then you might choose to adjust the default so you get closer to the right 'amount' of beer.

Gotta race now but ask any more questions you have if that makes no sense which it may not!
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Post #10 made 11 years ago
by monkeyman
Thanks again PP. I entered my numbers in the measurements and records section but I think I will take them out since I might have botched something on this one. I didn't mention it here and probably should have but my reading of 1.047 was my third reading. I took one at 20 minutes into the mash ( 1.042), then 40 minutes into the mash (1.046) and finally at 60 minutes (1.047). I can see I should have let it ride but I got greedy and thought I could get more beer. Bad monkey, no banana!!

Post #11 made 11 years ago
by PistolPatch
No banana - lol!!!

majorphill - Sorry major, I missed your post #5 above somehow. I'm guessing that monkey's VIB included his 1200 ml top-up. This plus a GIB of 1.044 gives him an EIB of 97.9% which is pretty possible on a small batch size where the bag can be squeezed a lot easier thatn a larger bag.

monkey - Sorry mate, I forgot to add the file in above but basically, assuming what I wrote to majorphill above is correct, then your EIB and EAW were pretty close to each other which tends to give validity to your measurements on that brew. Hard to get good measurements on small batch sizes so don't be worried in future if you don't always get close matches between EIB and EAW.

Also some grains convert faster than others so be careful only foing a 60 minute mash. You don't have the problems of a large bag so I am just thinking that small batch brewers are going to get high EIB anyway so a 90 minute mash time is way less critical for them.

;)
PP
Last edited by PistolPatch on 19 May 2014, 16:08, edited 1 time in total.
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