Clockwise starting at the top: American Chocolate Malt, Domestic 2-Row, Victory Malt, and Crystal 40L
I’m tormented by my recent drop in mash efficiency. Tormented I tell you. And since I didn’t have to work today I decided to brew yet again, even though I just brewed last night and I’ll be brewing with my brother-in-law tomorrow. But this time my goal is simply to figure out how to get my 3.5 quart efficiency up to the 70% mark like it usually is for my 2.5 gallon beers. So I’m going to be moving further away from my little experiments and sparging more and boiling longer. As you’ll see, the results, while not perfect, are still encouraging. I hope I didn’t just spoil this post for everybody.
Let’s jump right in with the recipe shall we? I wanted to make more of the brown ale but didn’t have all the grains to replicate it, so I came up with this one instead:
Brown Ale v2.0
Batch size: 0.875 gallons
1.75 lbs Domestic 2-row
1.5 oz Crystal 40L
1 oz American Chocolate Malt
0.75 oz Victory Malt
0.25 oz Willamette @ 60
0.18 oz Fuggles @ 5
American Ale Yeast (I used some of the slurry from the rye ale)
My first process change was to sparge an extra time, splitting up the entire boil volume in thirds, more or less. Additionally, I wanted to collect more wort and boil for 90 minutes rather than my standard 60 – so given that about 1 quart boils off every 15 minutes I needed to collect 9.5 quarts to boil down to 3.5 quarts. This would be divided like so:
2.5 qts mash in
1.5 qts mash out
3 qts sparge #1
3 qts sparge #2
Good soup. Hot.
With the grain absorbing about half a quart there will be 9.5 quarts going into the boil kettle. What I forgot to factor in was the actual size of my kettle – which I don’t actually know. I just know that it’s not very big, and as you can see in the picture above it can barely contain the 9.5 quarts with enough room not to boil over. But everything worked out fine and it didn’t boil over. It took a little longer to get a good hot break, but I wasn’t in a hurry today. When the break started to subside I set the timer for 30 minutes and walked away.
The peanut butter is from Peanut Butter & Co. in NYC. It’s really good.
Ninety minutes feels like forever when you’re used to boiling for an hour. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but I did feel like I had a lot of time to kill. So I made myself a pot of coffee and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, both of which were delicious.
During the long-as-eternity boil I noticed the wort wasn’t boiling off as much as I had expected it to, so I upped the heat a little about half way through. I had a pretty vigorous boil going then so I figured I was in the clear (foreshadowing?). Now skip forward some to the point where I’m chilling the wort with my immersion chiller. I noticed that the chiller sat entirely below the surface of the wort, which is not normal for these size batches and my home-made chiller – there was too much wort left. How did I not boil off enough? I don’t know, but what I do know is that it screwed with my gravity. I wanted to get in the 1.055 area but ended up at 1.041, which is about as far off as all my other recent batches. The difference here is that I have about 1.25 gallons of wort, not 0.875.
Ahhh…natural light. Probably shouldn’t have the beer there, though.
Check that out. That right there is my 3 gallon carboy filled more than one-third full with brown ale. Given my amount of wort, I went to the HBD Beer Recipator page and calculated my efficiency – 70%! Woohoo! Problem solved? Not quite. I think sparging twice helped a lot but I don’t know if that much water was necessary. I may be able to sparge twice with just 2 quarts each instead of three and be able to boil for 60 minutes, in which case my boil off is not a problem. If I need to collect all that wort and boil for 90 minutes I have to figure out this evaporation issue. Either way, I’m happy with the results and think the beer will come out just fine.
Yes – I use pink index cards. You got a problem with that?
Currently, I have three beers in primary, one in secondary in the fridge, two carbing in bottles, and one ready to drink. That can get kind of confusing so I’m going to start attaching data sheets to all my fermenters, this way I can keep track of everything without going through notebooks to figure out when I brewed each beer. I’m not saying I’m the first person to do something like this, just that it’s a first for me. I’m not even sure it’ll help me yet since I just started using it. If any of you, my loyal readers, have a convenient / clever way of managing your beers that I should try, let me know in the comments.
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