First all grain, where did I miss the gravity?

Mashing
1

Did my first all grain yesterday and it was pretty cool. I did a the urca vanilla porter from NB. I wasn’t sure what to start with for strike water, so I found a calculator that said for my 11.85 lbs I need 4.5 gallons. Since I only have a 5 gallon mash cooler, I just filled it with as much water as I could on my grain. Mash in was 156 and I went with 166 and it came a bit low, so I added a bit of boiling water and got it back. I mashed out at 180, and just kept sparging until I hit my 6 gallon boil volume.

In all of that, I ended up hitting OG of 1.070 instead of 1.061. I’m assuming that my higher mash out is to blame, but not sure. What should I change?

2

Not knowing water volumes, it is hard to say, but did you fly sparge? If so, it may have been just an efficiency issue (greater efficiency than batch sparging, perhaps). It rarely happens that I exceed the OG, but I make it up with longer mashes and they tend to lower the FG, but sometimes at the risk of dryness.

Also, maybe the temperature was not exactly what you thought - it could have been on the high side, which will leave the beer a little more full bodied.

It sounds like you have a good beer going - I wouldn’t sweat it too much, but repeat the process until you get your system dialed in to where your results are predictable.

:cheers:

3

What was your post boil volume? I start with about 7.5 pre boil for a 90 min boil. You may have boiled off more than intended.

4

Thanks for the reply. I fly sparged and not certain on the water amounts. I know I had a full mash and used another full cooler of water to sparge. I ended up with my 6 gallons for preboil though.

5

I did a 60 min boil and ended a touch over 5 gallons. I knew 60 min on my setup boils off 1 gallon.

6

Are you crushing your own grain or is the store doing it? If you are doing it, you probably have a finer crush and thus better efficiency.

If you are consistently getting higher efficiency, use a recipe calculator to figure out how much base grain you need to omit to get the OG you want.

7

I had NB crush the grains for the kit. Since it was a kit, I thought I would get closer to the OG. Do you think the hotter mash out would raise my OG 10pts?

8

Nope. Maybe 1 or 2.

9

On future brews, try and keep track of volumes as best you can. The more info you can get, the better chance you’ll have of maintaining consistency, and getting help from the forum. You may just be getting better efficiency than the kit had figured on. That’s not a problem, but you need to know what your system will give you. There’s always the chance that your hydro reading could have been a bit off, too. I know mine is 0.004 off, or if you use aerated wort, it can float the hydro a bit higher.

10

Will do. Thanks for everyones input.