While we in Upstate New York get pounded by our third or fourth straight day of 6 to 8 inch snow fall, I am sitting infront of a fire, watching Monday Night Football and enjoying an IPA. Life is good.
As for the brew day, there was room for improvement. Don’t get me wrong, I think that our pilsner will be a fine beer, but for the second week in a row, there were brew volume issues. Allow me to explain.
The recipe was pretty simple, 42.75lbs pilsner malt, 2lbs cara pils dex. With a total malt bill weight of nearly 45lbs, I planned a total brew volume of 29.5gallons. The idea was to have a 24.5 gallon pre-boil volume, thus giving us 5 gallons of absortion on the mash. This was split up as a 14gallon strike at 135f with a 126f step for the protein rest, a 6 gallon addition at 188f to raise the temp to 158f, and a 4.5 gallon dection to get the mash up to 168 for mashout. I was going to sparge with 9.5 gallons of water at 175f to add up to my total volume desired of 29.5 gallons.
There were a few temps that we missed on and I had to add an extra rest to ensure that all our conversions happened, but in the end, all that was fine. When the time came to run off into our fermentors, we were each a gallon short of our desired 10 gallons. Now the gravity wound up at 1.054, well above the target 1.048, so we were extracting the proper gravity, we just did not get the volume we needed. The solution is easy enough, but the more important question is; why are we short on volume?
Last night I took some time and reviewed Ray Daniels book Designing Great Beers to try and get some insight on where I might be going wrong on my water volume calculations and it didn’t take long to figure the problem out. According to Ray, my volume calculations should have been as follows:
45lbs grain weight x .2= 9 gal of water lost in absorption
I took and adjusted everything else in my system through my other calculations and it all worked out. This appears to be the problem area. I use Beer Smith so I’ll have to figure out if there is something in the settings that is causing the problems.
In other news, I found a great little corner of my basement that is a nice steady 54f, prefect primary lagering temp, to keep my babbies bubbling in. Excellent!
Cheers.
