8% alcohol but no buzz?

I never heard of this hard and fast "5 gallon rule."

Boil off rate for me is fairly constant, but not exact. I don't care if it's exact either*. Nor do I top off with water to reach a certain volume. Hop absorption affects my volumes considerably. I resign myself to getting whatever I get out of each batch, and I'm fine with that. I would never top off now that I'm doing full boils and all grain. Even when I was doing extract, I did everything possible to minimize topping off.

*I realize this means perfect replication of a recipe probably isn't going to happen, but again I don't care. It's homebrew, and I don't mind if every batch is a little different. I have brewed the same recipes multiple times tho, and they come out pretty darn close, despite my lack of caring about the exact details of every batch.

 

There is a such thing as operator error.

As was stated above, several times, if you took your measurement before you diluted with water, this would change the OG. The more water you add the lower the OG, due to decreasing the density of sugar in your wort (Density = mass/volume.... you're not changing the mass of sugar by adding water, you're changing the volume, and as a result, the density of sugar and your OG goes down).

Hydrometer readings are also temperature dependent, so taking it at a temperature and not correcting for it will again reduce the accuracy of your measurement.

 

If you take 1 shot of vodka and mix it with an equal amount of orange juice does that give you the equivalent of 2 shots of vodka in the glass? Same principle applies to the sugars with top off water. You still have the same amount of sugars but they get diluted and spread over more liquid.

If you took your OG before the top off water there is a different concentration of sugars than if you took the OG after you mixed in the water.

And yes I hit my 5 gallon mark almost on the dot each time to be honest, since you asked.

 

Erm... I'm assuming the Spanish Ham likes his meat. You didn't take the time to note Hanzo's profile to see you're hitting on a guy, eh?

 

Dirty.

 

Notice how the "dirty" wasn't a reply to your post, but instead to Gecko Punk's? His comment about you liking meat, was what I was commenting on, as dirty.

See comments above about help with the Hydrometer/ABV.

 

I plugged your recipe into hopville's beercalculus, which I have found reliable, and got the following:

OG: 1.035

FG: 1.009

ABV: 3.5%

To hit 8%, you would have had to have used ~14# of extract

 

No worries.

 

Been hitting up the homebrew, eh?

<drunk while posting error>

It happens. Life continues. RDWHAHB

 

It's not "probably." You don't have 8% ABV. It's not a possibility. We gave you several possible reasons why your readings would lead you to believe that you do. Since you don't remember what you did, we'll never know which one it was. But the possibilities are not hard to understand, with a little reading.

www.howtobrew.com
Seriously.

 

You are using about 7# of grain and another pound of sugars, and you expected to get an 8% abv from a 5 gallon recipe which got scaled up to a six gallon batch? Huh. That's the root of your expectations not meeting your reality. Fail again. Fail better.

 

I haven't added top off water before. I start with 6.5 gallons in my kettle. End up with around 5.5 after a 60 minute boil. Usually get just over 5 gallons in the fermenter. If somehow I ended up with under 5 gallons so be it. If I wanted to end up with 6 gallons I would scale everything up.

 

First of all, my assumption (as, I'm sure others') that you were relatively inexperienced was a based on the fact that some of your questions/issues/techniques were about fundamentals - the kind of questions that are more common among new brewers who haven't read Palmer or Papazian.

For example, you seemed to believe that you could add 20% more water without impacting the gravity (if that was the case, then a single 12 oz can of beer could be made to last you and your friends the whole evening). Then there's your confusion over how to read the hydrometer (depending on the gradations, the difference between 1.010 and "a few notches down" from 1.010 can be huge). Third, your expectation of 8% ABV from that recipe simply isn't rational from someone who has done even a little bit of reading or brewing.

I'm not saying these are not valid questions, only that they tend to be more common among new brewers. Thus, our assumption about your level of experience.

But relax - we didn't mean to offend.

As to topping off with water - I haven't done that since I moved from stove top extract brews to all grain on the patio. My 13-ish gallons of wort evaporates down to a pretty consistent 10-ish gallons over the course of a 90 minute boil. It's pretty predictable - again, something that you learn after only a few batches.

And 6 gallons is just as fine as 5 gallons. They just require a different recipe to get the 'same' beer. You'll be disappointed if you brew 6 gallons using a 5 gallon recipe (would you double a cookie recipe by simply adding more flour or would you increase the other ingredients, as well?)

FYI in a 5 gallon batch, 1 lb sugar adds just under 1% ABV. 1 lb DME adds about .7%, 1 lb LME adds about .6%. But you'll upset the balance designed into the recipe if you add these indiscriminately. I should also note that 1 gal of water added to 5 gallons of beer will reduce the ABV by exactly 16.67%.