Another BIAB First - Mistakes Were Made

Well, it sounds worse than it is. I totally misread my excel spreadsheet on brew day and thought that I didn't have to add my sparge to my wort. I got around 2 gallons instead of my 3.5 goal. At least the wort was way over the top of the target gravity. I ended up adding a half gallon of distilled water to the wort to try and thin it out a little bit. Oh well, lesson learned, trust the spreadsheet!

I plan on making a black IPA version of this IPA next. It is a really simple grain bill, and I still have enough hops left over for a second batch of it. Next time, I will add my sparge water. Let's not talk about efficiency until then.

Thanks for all the help I received on this forum. The information here is invaluable.

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Thanks, guys. Yeah, this was a Maxi-BIAB, and I have posted a few questions there, and received great answers. I've used quite a bit of tips and tricks, including the Maxi-BIAB calculator (the one that I misread). I know exactly what my problem was; I was going by the actual brew numbers and trying to tweak those instead of using the numbers that the calculator generated in the recipe portion of the calculator.

One other thing I messed up was that I forgot to sanitize the bowl in which I rehydrated my US-05 yeast. So, if there is an infection, I'll have a good idea where that came from. I didn't taste the wort, which was silly of me. I will work that into my process.

I am looking forward to trying this again, and fixing my mistakes! I am pretty confident that my beer will come out fine though, provided I don't get that infection.

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My first brew the dogs ripped the bag out of the esky and the grain went into the mash but the lid came off the esky and by the time I found it was down to 60c lol went ahead and strained grain threw another bag it fermented out heaps but I got beer.

I never sanitise my tap when transferring to keg I do clean it and some times spray it with star san if there is some mixed other wise dont bother. I do alot of things that people may think is stupid like to airate the wort I pull spoon out of sodium perc mix, rinse and tip bit of boiling water over straight into wort lol no infection yet. I did read if you get a infection every 10 brews your not to bad off and with at least 40-50 under my belt and no infection id say I am doing ok.

I have had a infection in a cube I tipped before adding yeast but the cube and wort are no more so I guess you could call that 1 and that was my fault I thought I could mash and then boil 3 days later! wrong lucky it was only a 5lt cube

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