Ok so I am in the process of brewing this recipe right now and collecting my first runnings question my brew pal is telling me to sparge with 188 degrees water seems high, any input? Iam sparging with 3 gallons DOUBLE IPA RECIPE 1.093/1.023 (5.5 Gal) Grain Bill 14 lbs. - 2 Row Pale Malt 1 lb. - Crystal Malt (40L) 1 lb. - Munich Malt (10L) 1 lb. - Carapils Hop Schedule (98 IBU) 2.0 oz - Magnum (60 min.) 1 oz - chinook (15 min.) 1 oz - Centennial (5 min.) 1 oz - Centennial whole leaf - Dry Hop in secondary 1 oz cascade -dry hop 7 days 1 oz columbus- dry hop 7 days 1 oz centennial- dry hop 7 days Yeast Wyeast 1056 1800 ml starter Mash/Sparge/Boil Mash at 152° for 60 min. Sparge as usual Cool and ferment at 66° to 68°
Ideally you want the temp of the grain bed to come up to 170, which means that the sparge water should be hotter than 170. I generally batch sparge with water that's about 185 +/-. That said, it doesn't make that much of a difference, if you're a few degrees cooler the worst case scenario is that you lose a point or two of efficiency.
yeah I did 170, but anyways can I do a 90 minute boil instead of a 60, it's boiling right now but I think my effecieny was alittal low. Will doing a 90 min boil change a lot in my beer
Doing a 90 minute boil will boil off more water, so your post boil OG will be higher than it would be with a 60 minute boil. If you have already added your bittering hops, 90 minutes will make the beer more bitter than 60 minutes, but not very much more. The difference in utilization between 60 minutes and 90 minutes is pretty small. You're probably looking at a difference of a few IBUs.
ok i did a 90, for some reason when I took a pre boil gravity it read low as hell like 1.030 low, but my post boil is perfect 1.070 what's up with that?
Did you stir the wort well before taking your reading? If not then you may have been reading mostly final runnings.
yeah I made sure I stir it before, yeah I don't know but my gravity is right were it's suppose to be 1.070 I just can't figure out why it read low pre boil
6 gallons of 1.030 wort would produce a 5 gallon batch of 1.036 wort. I see you didn't adjust for temp, but I thought I would use that as an example anyway. Pre-boil gravity is a good tool and it is a simple equatuion to figure out your post boil gravity. If you collect 6 gallons at 1.030 and are going to boil it down to 5 gallons then this is the simple math: (Gravity points) x (Preboil volume) So in your case: 30 x 6 = 36 or 1.036 wort after boil (post boil volume) 5 I use pre-boil gravity often and think it can be a useful tool. I used to have a very sporadic efficiency and would often adjust my hops based on gravity readings, or sometimes add in other fermentables such as a little bit of DME to get my gravity up.
Correct. There are correction calculators on the internet, such as http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/hydrometer.html that can get you pretty close to accurate with the wort temperature.
