First Time All Grain Brewing Mistake

[spacey]

First All Grain Brewing Mistake:

My first all grain brewing day was yesterday - Northern Brewer's "Summer Squeeze Lemon Shandy" (9.5 pounds of grain)

I misunderstood the instructions from Northern Brewer and instead of pouring 1 gallon of 170F water into the mash tun for batch sparging, I poured the entire 5 gallons of sparge water (at 170F) into the mash tun. The 10 gallon mash tun was nearly full at this point, so I batch sparged for 20 minutes and then transferred the fluids into the brew kettle and continuted the hour long boil normally. I never used my upper container to slowly circulate hot water into the mash tun.

Is the batch ruined, or will I maybe just have some off flavors?

 

[day_trippr]

If you followed the instruction's math you would have used ~8.3 gallons of liquor. Less the grain retention I would think the pre-boil volume would be 7-ish gallons. To get close to the recipe OG you'd need to boil that down to the prescribed post-boil volume.

Shouldn't be a quality problem...

Cheers!

 

[hotbeer]

You really won't know if it's ruined till you do all the steps and finish the process all the way to the glass.

If you had a hydrometer to take the OG of the wort after the boil, then we might can make a few assumptions.

The biggest question is whether the thermal mass of all that water allowed any or stopped all the conversion process of starch to sugars.

But if it's happily fermenting away, then it'll be something.

 

[spacey]

You really won't know if it's ruined till you do all the steps and finish the process all the way to the glass.

If you had a hydrometer to take the OG of the wort after the boil, then we might can make a few assumptions.

The biggest question is whether the thermal mass of all that water allowed any or stopped all the conversion process of starch to sugars.

But if it's happily fermenting away, then it'll be something.

The hydrometer value just before the boil was 1.0375 SG / 9.25 Brix.
The hydrometer value just before pitching yeast was 1.040 / 10.00 Brix.

 

[madscientist451]

1.040 sounds ok for a summer beer, how are you adding the lemon flavor?

 

[hotbeer]

A quick look on their website shows that should have a OG of 1.045. So your 1.040 is close enough on that.

Still, water temperature affects the conversion rates of starch into the various sugars that comprise beer. Some being more fermentable than others. Some not fermentable at all by some beer yeast.

So you might just not wind up with what the beer was intended to be. Might not ferment out enough to get you the 4.4% ABV that they say. Which will be a FG that is a tad less than 1.012 if you'd made it to a OG of 1.045 to the fermenter.

Still, I'm not too sure what happens when all water at 170° is used. Nor do I know if unconverted starch will contribute to the density of the water to affect your SG reading.

And looking at the instructions, I'm not too certain where you got the idea to even use 5 gallons of water.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2...nShandy-1531516797227.pdf?4904184875979189207

Still my advice is to just wait and see what it tastes like. I'm sure many of us have put in the FV what we thought was our most perfectly brewed wort only to have it taste like wash water when we tried a glass of the finished product.

 

[spacey]

1.040 sounds ok for a summer beer, how are you adding the lemon flavor?

The box came with 12 grams of crystallized lemon for bottling/kegging day. I like a lot of citrus in my homebrew so I added 1 oz. of bitter orange peel at the beginning of the boil and another 1 oz. of bitter orange peel at the last 20 minutes of the boil.

 

[spacey]

And looking at the instructions, I'm not too certain where you got the idea to even use 5 gallons of water.

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2...nShandy-1531516797227.pdf?4904184875979189207

It said 2 quarts/pound of grain, I guess it should have been 4.75 gallons and I rounded up to 5 gallons. Does that make a significant difference?

 

[redrocker652002]

It said 2 quarts/pound of grain, I guess it should have been 4.75 gallons and I rounded up to 5 gallons. Does that make a significant difference?

I am by no means a pro, or even a novice at this point, but when I put my recipe into Brewfather App, I usually round up or down. If it says I need 4.75 gallons for the mash, I round up to 5. For the sparge, I will round as well and try and end up about 7.5 to 8 gallons preboil. I have even had to add water to top off the fermenter or get my OG down a tad, so it's all good. Try it, you never know, you might like it.

 

[mashdar]

Am I correct that you mashed first, drained, and then accidentally put too much water in for sparge? (Sparge comes after your 60m mash)

If so, it'll be fine. Slightly lower ABV, slightly less body, and slightly more diluted lemon flavor. No big deal.

"RDWHAHB"

 

[hotbeer]

It's a little confusing how you wrote it. Or maybe it's just confusing how I read it! Word terms describing the mash and other processes prior to boil, get used interchangeably sometimes by mistake or from just being noob. I still find myself using the wrong terms all too frequently.

I was sort of taking your "sparge" to mean you mashed the wort with that amount of water instead of the 3.5ish gallons they recommended for strike water.

I didn't see that they gave you a temp to heat the strike water too. So what did you use for that? Were you able to hit and keep the mash temp near 152°F for the 60 minutes before doing the mash out with 5 gallons of 170°F water?

Or is it as I was originally thinking that you only added 5 gallons of 170°F water to the 9.5 pounds of malts?

 

[whoaru99]

I'm not quite following the preboil and post boil SGs. 1.0375 to 1.040 isn't much boil off, right?

 

[doug293cz]

I'm not quite following the preboil and post boil SGs. 1.0375 to 1.040 isn't much boil off, right?

Not really. It's a (40 - 37.5) / 40 = 0.0625 fractional, or 6.25% boil-off. If you started with 7 gal pre-boil, the boil-off would have been 7 * 0.0625 = ~0.44 gal, which is pretty low. This assumes of course that both SG readings are correct.

Brew on

 

[Bobby_M]

Write out all the steps you took throughout the entire brew session..

How much water did you put in the mash tun initially?
What temp was it?
When you stirred the grain in, what temperature was that mash then?
Did you test the temp at any kind of time interval?
How much time elapsed until you did something else?
What was that exactly?
When did you add 5 gallons of 170F water?
Did you drain anything out of the mash tun before adding the water or did you drain all of the wort out at once?
How many times did you stir the mash? When?

I know it sounds like a lot, but we're all farting in the wind without most of that information.


General comment out into the universe: This is why new all grain brewers should buy all in one systems and perform full volume, no sparge brewing.