Dead Ringer Strangeness

Hello all,

Less than 48 hours ago I brewed my first batch of all-grain. I chose to try the Dead Ringer kit from Northern Brewer. This is the fifth beer I have brewed, so I am quite novice. I followed all instructions to a tee, except I added Irish Moss in the 20 min hop addition. So just a minute ago I check on the fermentor and it looks as shown in the video below (I apologize for the video being sideways, it was with my phone). I have never seen such chunks being thrown around before. Does anybody have any input?

The only other thing I should mention is that my mash efficiency was not as good as it could have been. OG was 10.050 when it should have been 10.062-ish. I did add a bit of water to bring it up to the five gallon mark after yeast was pitched. Thank you in advance,

Looks like a nice healthy beer fermentation.

Concerning your volume and gravity: I’m interested in volume - more volume equals more beer, which is a good thing - but I’m more interested in gravity - hitting the desired gravity sometimes equals a smaller volume of better beer.

Check your gravity and volume before you start boiling. Check both again after 15 minutes and extrapolate your volume and gravity at the end of your intended boil period. Repeat at 30 minutes. Repeat at 45 minutes. Repeat at the end of the boil. All those measurements, especially if you record them and review your data after several brews will let you adjust your boil time and boil intensity to hit the volume and (more importantly) your gravity targets. You may need to extend your boil or add water based on your on-going measurements throughout the boil, You also can recalculate your hop additions on the fly to hit the intended bitterness and hop aroma additions.

Brewing software can make the process fairly simple even if you’re not a fan of algebra.

Thank you for the reply. Yeah I have been feeling like I should be logging this stuff. I am actually a fan of math, so there is no trouble there.

To be honest, I started the boil with ~6.3 gallons. After boil I had ~4. At this point the gravity was 10.050 (supposed to be 10.062-ish). I know I know this was probably a bad idea but I added a gallon of water. Two reasons made me do this:

  1. The final alcohol content was supposed to be high-6, and I was fine with anything between 4 and 5.
  2. It was hard to stomach getting much less than two cases of beer out of this. I know this is a bad reason, but it is what it is.

So - could I add priming sugar or something similiar? What would you guys recommend?

Thanks in advance,

1lb of table sugar will add about 1.009 to 5 gallons of beer. Same with 1lb of DME.

You could pull a quart of the beer out of the fermenter to boil it in. 5 min should be fine.

[quote=“Nighthawk”]1lb of table sugar will add about 1.009 to 5 gallons of beer. Same with 1lb of DME.

You could pull a quart of the beer out of the fermenter to boil it in. 5 min should be fine.[/quote]

Great, how does regular sugar affect the taste?

You should not “taste” the sugar. Beet, cane, corn. They should be unnoticeable at this level.

It’s mentioned in the books that above 10% sugar may lend to a “cidery” favor. You are not near that point.

Simple sugars will help the FG to be lower than a malt based sugar as they are completely fermentable.

Fermentation is good.

Are you batch sparging? If so did you stir it when you added the sparge water?