First all grain (BIAB)

Unlikely that your beer is "dangerous to drink" - that's number one.
In fact, odds are it will probably be drinkable if the rest of your process was generally sound.

Your mash temp issue may impact the final taste of the brew, but keeping notes on what occurred will help you when it comes time for tasting.

Oh - and as a fellow BIAB-er - welcome to the hobby (though it's your fifth batch) !

 

#1. It will be fine
#2. It will be fine
#3. I don't have great success with whirlpooling to isolate trub, but I try. I transfer wort from kettle to fermenter with a racking cane and siphon, I keep the racking cane 2 inches or so higher than the kettle bottom. If I am watching when racking, I will observe whether I have clear wort as the liquid level nears the level the cane is set to. If it is clear, I will push the cane down incrementally to siphon off the remain wort until I start to get trub.

 

I'm definitely considering BIAB for when I do my first all-grain brewing, although there are a few parts of the process that I'm not clear on. For example, what do you do if your efficiency is off? Say you were making a 3 gallon batch and you had 4 gallons of wort before boiling, but your gravity is off. Do you add malt extract to bring it up if too low? Do you add water if too high? Do you just forget about it and live with a beer that is more or less alcoholic than you initially planned for?

 

Do what you just mentioned, add dry malt extract for more gravity, water for less.

 

“Do you add malt extract to bring it up if too low? Do you add water if too high? Do you just forget about it and live with a beer that is more or less alcoholic than you initially planned for?”

In the past I have done all three depending on my mood and the given beer style.

A few weeks ago I got an uncharacteristically bad efficiency which I think was due to a poor crush by my LHBS. For that beer I really wanted to meet my target OG so I boiled some DME and added it to the fermenter.

Last year I got a lower than expected OG while brewing a Wit. I learned later that Castle Pilsner Malt will result in lower efficiency. That beer had an OG of 1.044 which was close enough to my target of 1.048 that I didn’t add any DME and I was happy with that decision.

I have on occasion added some water if I was too high but you need to make sure you have sufficient headspace in your fermenter. I used a 7.9 gallon plastic bucket so I have lots of margin to add top off water.

Cheers!

 

Thanks for the replies. As for adding DME or water, I was thinking more of doing that at the start of the boil. If you take your gravity measurement pre-boil, then you can calculate your expecting post-boil gravity and theoretically adjust, assuming you have a good idea what your boil-off rate will be. I might end up with a bit more than 3 gallons of beer if my efficiency is somehow super high, but I ferment 3-gallon batches in a 5-gallon carboy, so I don't think that would be a huge deal (although I guess I would need to adjust my hop additions if I was off by a large amount). Food for thought!

 

Your strike temp actually sounds a bit low by the calculator I use. When I shoot for 152 I strike at 164.

 

you probably mash at 1.25 qt/# of grain. The OP was probably much thinner.

 

I don't think I've ever seen any numbers on strike temperatures and fermentability. I've been blindly led to believe that 149 and 150 yields a more fermentable wort with less body than a 157 or 158. So, expect a little more body and a little higher FG. Maybe a few points.

If you make a red that's too strong you end up with a delicious brown ale.
If you make a red that's too weak you end up with a delicious tea to drink.

 

Greg Doss presented data at the NHS a couple years ago, which you can access if you're an AHA member. Kai Troester published data on the web a few years ago, and AFAIK it's still out there in his wiki-like pages. Both found a mash temperature center sweet spot for fermentability that was North of 150.

 

^ Typo, should say "NHC"

 

It sounds like you either have a mash tun (mash kettle) with very little thermal mass (which is a parameter on the BrewHouse parameters tab, BTW), or there could be a measurement error, e.g. an inaccurate thermometer/measurement. Were the grist and water thoroughly (completely) mixed before you started taking temp readings?

 

On a brighter note this will open up a lot of great names for this beer:

O Ring of Fire
Head Gasket (IPA)

You see where this is going.

 

Probably something very close to zero. Maybe zero for practical purposes. And yes, your heat loss per hour will be pretty large, if you're not insulating or direct heating somehow.

I'm not clear on whether you stirred just long enough to get a homogeneous temperature throughout, or if you stirred a really long time, as heat dissipated into the air.

I don't think it could have really hurt anything.

 

The value of 0.74 for the Coleman (or any Mash Tun Initial Heat Absorption Value) is not temperature dependent. But the calculations do assume that the "Ambient Grain and Tun Temp (degrees F)" on the Recipe tab is accurate. (I don't pre-heat anything, other than bringing the mash tun up form the basement the day before brewing so it reaches the same "ambient" temp as the grains.)