I brewed our hosts Tallgrass wheat. During the boil, I replaced the water loss with more boiling water from my HLT. I started with just over 7.5 gallons. I loose about 3 gallons an hour from this 15 gallon kettle during the boil. And this is not a real vigorous boil! I should have known I was thinning the beer. OG came out 1.032. In the mean time I bought a refractometer and took a Brix reading yesterday (4.7). After using some conversion tables it seems this beer comes out at a whopping 1.9 ABV. It has been in the primary for about 4 weeks. Is this beer going to be drinkable, or should I trash it? Live and learn.
Don’t trash it!!!
Keg/bottle it and drink it as an extreme-session beer. It may not be great, but I’m sure it will be drinkable (kinda).
Maybe I’ll call it small grass. Could drink a gallon and not even get a buzz! 
I’m confussed? Are you saying that you ended up with more volume at the end of the boil?
So you replaced all the water boiled off with the same amount from the HLT? So instead of the 5.0 (ish) gallons at end of boil, going into fermenter, you ended up with 7.5(ish)?
If you have a 3 gallon an hour boil off, you theoretically should have ended with about 4.5, so adding a half gallon of water afterwards would have been fine (preferably cool / cold water into the fermenter to help chill the wort?
PLus, at this point, 4 weeks later, I’m sure you’re way more than done fermenting, you should be at bottling time by now.
There are things you could have done right away to get the OG up, like adding LME to the fermenter, but what’s done is done.
I started with less pre boil wort than usual. Knowing I will loose water during the boil, I added water while boiling. I started with 7.5 gallons pre boil, and finished with 6.5 going into the fermenter. Plus I loose volume from sediment after sparging and the boil. I probably added close to three gallons during the boil,thus thinning out what would have been a good beer. I know not to do that again.
[quote=“jaygtr”]So you replaced all the water boiled off with the same amount from the HLT? So instead of the 5.0 (ish) gallons at end of boil, going into fermenter, you ended up with 7.5(ish)?
If you have a 3 gallon an hour boil off, you theoretically should have ended with about 4.5, so adding a half gallon of water afterwards would have been fine (preferably cool / cold water into the fermenter to help chill the wort?
PLus, at this point, 4 weeks later, I’m sure you’re way more than done fermenting, you should be at bottling time by now.
There are things you could have done right away to get the OG up, like adding LME to the fermenter, but what’s done is done.[/quote]
I have DME but no LME. And I did think about adding the DME before I fired up the wort chiller. But I had no idea how much it would take to bring up the OG to 1.046 from 1.032. So I left it alone. Yep, it is ready to keg, I’ll take one more Brix reading, but the work schedule prevents me from racking to the keg until next week. Funny though, my basement is 60 degrees, and after fermenting for better than three weeks as of last Sunday, the airlock still would bubble once in a great while. But I am sure it is done now. Tomorrow If I get 4.7 on the Brix, I’ll keg at the first chance.
You want to have all of your preboil volume in the kettle before you start boiling unless you just want to add it to the fermenter before you pitch your yeast.
Anyway the only way to know is to drink a sample of it then you will know if its worth keeping or not.
May be a dumb question, but did you convert your Brix reading to account for the alcohol. 1.9% seems awfully low, even based on thinning it out
When I made the beer, I used a hydrometer to take a pre boil and OG reading. Then I bought a Vee Gee ATC refractometer. I found a conversion chart for Brix to gravity. I don’t have the exact numbers right now but OG was 1.032,converts to 8.04 Brix. The reading I took yesterday was 4.7 Brix. On our hosts web page there are conversion formulas that will calculate your Brix numbers when alcohol is present in the beer during and after fermentation to give you ABV. Maybe I screwed something up because this is all new to me.
Just ran the numbers again, this time I got 3.088. That’s a little better. Don’t know where I got 1.9% ABV.
yea, a really simple rule of thumb to get within 5-10% of ABV is just looking at the starting gravity.
a OG of 1.060, if it ferments fully, should be about 5.5-6% alcohol
A 1.040 would be just under 4% and so on
[quote=“560sdl”]yea, a really simple rule of thumb to get within 5-10% of ABV is just looking at the starting gravity.
a OG of 1.060, if it ferments fully, should be about 5.5-6% alcohol
A 1.040 would be just under 4% and so on[/quote]
What style of beer would work fermenting down to 1.000?
[quote=“Jonny”]
What style of beer would work fermenting down to 1.000?[/quote]
It should not happen. It is next to impossible to get 100% conversion of the starches in the grain.
Possible if you get an infection and it turns to vinegar. I didn’t check the gravity of my batch of vinegar so I might be wrong.
[quote=“560sdl”]yea, a really simple rule of thumb to get within 5-10% of ABV is just looking at the starting gravity.
a OG of 1.060, if it ferments fully, should be about 5.5-6% alcohol
A 1.040 would be just under 4% and so on[/quote]
Thanks! That is good to know!
Brad
Jonny wrote:
What style of beer would work fermenting down to 1.000?
It should not happen. It is next to impossible to get 100% conversion of the starches in the grain.
Possible if you get an infection and it turns to vinegar. I didn’t check the gravity of my batch of vinegar so I might be wrong.
When I take a Brix reading today, I better check for an infection. I did not do that the other day.
Brad
[quote=“Jonny”][quote=“560sdl”]yea, a really simple rule of thumb to get within 5-10% of ABV is just looking at the starting gravity.
a OG of 1.060, if it ferments fully, should be about 5.5-6% alcohol
A 1.040 would be just under 4% and so on[/quote]
What style of beer would work fermenting down to 1.000?[/quote]
Wyeast French Saison 3711 is a fermenting monster. It will eat and eat and eat. If you mash on the lower side and use some sugar, it can really knock down that FG. I brewed a Dark Saison (winter warmer) with 1lb of honey and 1lb of D2 syrup. Mashed at 150F - OG 1.076 - FG 1.005 - ABV 9.5%!
But yeah, to get down to 1.000 or lower, you’d need to be talking about a mead. They can finish that lower and even lower.
Lower than 1.000? How is that even possible?
[edit]Palmer to the rescue
http://www.howtobrew.com/appendices/appendixA.html
with the moderately obvious answer 
[quote=“ickyfoot”]Lower than 1.000? How is that even possible?
[edit]Palmer to the rescue
http://www.howtobrew.com/appendices/appendixA.html
with the moderately obvious answer
Yup. A fellow brewer friend who also makes mead has a peach mead that finished at something like 0.997 I believe. I drank a single bomber one night not really thinking about it and was surprised to find myself pretty tipsy when I stood up.
[quote=“Jonny”][quote=“560sdl”]yea, a really simple rule of thumb to get within 5-10% of ABV is just looking at the starting gravity.
a OG of 1.060, if it ferments fully, should be about 5.5-6% alcohol
A 1.040 would be just under 4% and so on[/quote]
What style of beer would work fermenting down to 1.000?[/quote]
I think you misinterpreted my post. It was for a quick rule of thumb and does not require that the beer ferment to 1.000 to work.
The actual formula is:
ABV is (OG-FG) x 0.133, so for a beer that starts at OG = 1.057 and finishes at FG = 1.012 (.57-.12) x 0.133 = 5.99%
So can you see how you “might” be able to round something that starts at near 1.060 to estimate at “about” 6%?
Extract brewers will probably not get FG’s quite that low and if the beer is darker, it will end up with an even higher FG so the % ABV will be lower
