Newbie homebrewer, couple questions

I'm assuming when you say sparging you mean racking. Racking is the transferring of liquid from one bucket to another. In that case you have unnecessarily exposed yourself to contamination but it probably wont hurt you. I believe the contact time necessary for StarSan to work is about a minute.

Low OG wont get you off flavors just a different beer.

You want to rehydrate yeast when you're pitching dry yeast for better health.

Your airlock problem sounds fine. Airlock activity doesn't give you an accurate depiction of fermentation remember to take gravity readings.

Keep your sanitation clean if you're using a secondary. I just chuck them into primary without problems.

Question: what are you using for temperature control? That could give you some off flavors

 

How are you straining from kettle to fermenter? Leaving a short rest after the boil and whirlpooling can help with some of that depending on what your method is.

Also, it seems like 7-10 days is a common dry hopping time. But maybe if this is a recipe you plan on tackling a few times, you can do a shorter one first and then longer period next time and judge for yourself on which results you prefer.

 

I believe you mean you were simply transferring your wort to the primary? Sparging is something diffrent and done in all-grain brewing. If I am mistaken, I apologize.

I don't brew a lot of beers with a lot of hop pellets, particularly ones with enough pellets to clog a strainer. But when I brew and transfer to primary, I've never made a HUGE effort to keep them from going in. I simply pour into my ferementer and slow way up at the end, much like pouring a beer with yeast at the bottom of the bottle. I'm sure some hop elements end up in the fermenter but I'm okay with that.

Sanitizing the strainer was a good thing of course, I just probably wouldn't have used it in my processes.

Without watching and seeing you brew, hard to say as to WHY it was off but basically your initial reading is to determine how much fermentable sugar is in the wort for the yeast to eat. I don't know what kind of flavor difference it would make. Hopefully someone much more knowledgable than I can chime in. What this does mean though is that your yeast has less sugar to eat and thus will make less alcohol. I'd really look at my processes and make sure I was following the directions as best as possible to see how/where I was getting that far off. I've never done a kit from Brewer's Best - mine have all been Northern Brewer, can't speak to their clarity of instruction.

What was your first batch? For this batch listed - a 1061 OG, you should be at about 12 grams of yeast - per Mr. Malty. Not exact but a darn good educated guess and one many many homebrewers go by. I'd say you're more than fine with what you've done. Had you hit your 1075 OG - 15 grams of dry yeast would have been the amount recommended. Here's where you get MrMalty - http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html

Sounds like you have some blow off - a blow off tube might not be a bad idea. Give that yeast some time and it might really push but that's hard to say - again, I've never used Brewer's Best kits and can't see, exactly, what you have going on. Whatever you decide to do - sanitize it real well.

My first batch was a Chocolate Stout I brewed with a single vial of WL004 and an OG of 1051 - I had to use a blow off tube. Just did a Nut Brown (bottled on Sat) with Safale S-04 (one packet) and an OG of 1044 and no need for a blow off tube. The yeast and bucket/carboy will let you know what's going on. Pay attention a lot during the first 3 days.

Don't worry - the StarSan will not negatively affect the beer either.

Good luck!

 

The lower starting gravity should result in a lower final gravity, which will mean less sugar left in your beer. This may allow the bitterness and hop flavor to be even more prominent than the recipe intended (which could be fine for you).

As far as dry hopping, a lot of people here (myself included) would rather just add the dry hops to the primary fermentor and not risk oxidation/infection.

 

If you choose to dry hop in the primary just make sure you wait the primary fermentation is finished. You don't want all those precious aromas being carried away with the co2. This is one instance where the airlock actually is a useful gauge...

 

My usual process is (for an average strength beer) to add the hops in about ten days into primary fermentation, leave them in for about a week, and then take them out and cold crash for a couple days before bottling.

 

-Buy a hop bag. Its a small mesh-like bag that you put your hops into during the boil. Goes right into the wort and then when the boil is over just pull it out. get all the goodness of the hops without the mess. I have been in you situation before and it makes it a thousand times easier.

-This just means your ABV will be lower. It will taste a bit different but doesn't mean it wont be good. Just not exactly what you were going for. Not a big deal though.

-As long as you pitch the yeast at the right temps, usually under 75, even though i have done it as high as 78ish then you just need one packet. Because the first couple hours they dont do anything but rapidly reproduce to get to the right amount. Pitching more is just wasting your money. Re-hydrating can help (mixing them with water at a certain temp) before you add it, But I have had no issues either way with the same yeast your using.
I always use a blowoff tube the first few days because you just never know how crazy it may decide to get, but that said it wont really make the beer worse if you dont (that I am aware of. someone correct me if I'm wrong). Just makes a mess.

-Don't know to much with dry hopping, only done it once, but it tasted great. I did it after about a week, after fermentation had stopped. I didn't have a second carboy at the time so I just threw them in the primary. Gave it a week then bottled. Adds that hop gunk to it but that's not to big an issue with it being your second beer. Like I said it tasted great. It was actually my second beer as well. I did a DIPA recipe and it turned out to be absolutely delicious. Like we were shocked how good it actually was. The only thing was we had tons of residue in the bottle.

 

dont worry, relax and have a homebrew.

 

It doesn't sound like you're having as many issues as you think you are. I had the same worries at first, posting threads on multiple forums with tons of questions. Now that I've got multiple successful batches, I'm not so worried anymore. I just read a lot and try to learn as much as possible. Oh, and make sure to have some homebrew available for every brew session!

I have made five batches with directly pitched dry yeast and had no issues. Lately I've gone to rehydrating and that seems to be working fine (that batch isn't done yet though). I've also used liquid yeast for the first time and that one will probably reach high krausen today, so it looks like that's a success too.

Dry hopping - I've just been putting them in the primary and leaving them for about the last 7 days before bottling, and my dry hopped beers have come out smelling nicely hoppy.

I like the 68F fermentation, that's what mine is at right now. Definitely don't put it at 74F, keep it at 68F.

I broke my SG tester too, and I have no idea what OG my blonde ale is. I'm not worried about it, I'm expecting it's close enough to my target OG for me. I've got TWO of them on order, lol.

 

I've got some good news for you: you don't really need to strain the wort when transferring to the fermenter. What will happen is that the hops will settle to the bottom of the carboy over at the end of primary fermentation and you can then rack the beer to your glass carboy, siphoning carefully to leave the hops behind.

Although the hop matter will not harm the beer in quick fermenting ales, there are a number of things some of us do to try to minimize it a bit. You can add your hops to the boil in bags of various kinds. Also, a lot of us will make 6 gallon batches so that we don't have to try to transfer that last gallon of wort, which is where the bulk of the gunky stuff is. Just let it settle/cool and transfer the wort, leaving the dregs behind. If you're working from kits, they're usually set up for 5 gallons, but you can easily adapt the recipe by doing a little math and buying a few ingredients--or just put together your own recipe.

One other thing: You should examine your process to figure out why you SG was off. With extract brewing, it should be pretty straightforward: a given amount of malt extract will produce a certain gravity. Being on the light side won't ruin your beer, but you want to figure out why that happened. Did you mis-measure the LME? Misread the hydrometer? Or?

 

For what it's worth, I think you probably helped yourself a bit by pouring the wort through the strainer into the primary. It likely helped aerate the wort, which in turn will help the yeast. You said you did this after you chilled the wort, which makes it the one and only time where it's good to splash the stuff around.

I can also confirm that the hop debris will settle after the primary fermentation subsides, just like others have said, so don't worry about it next time. You could use a hop bag next time, or just let it settle with the yeast and other trub and rack the beer off everything when you secondary. I assume you will choose to secondary since you want to dry hop, but many advocate dry hopping right in the primary. Either way you will rack it at least once into the bottling bucket, and that is when you will separate the beer from the debris.

It sounds like you did a partial mash or mini mash, and you may have not gotten good conversion or good extraction out of the mash tun, resulting in your lower OG. There is a lot to troubleshoot in this area, but assuming you ended up with the correct volume of wort, the low OG probably resulted from a less than ideal mashing/lautering/sparging process.

In the end, it will probably still be o.k., but make sure you keep the airlock or blowoff tube super clean. Sanitize everything you touch it with from here on out, and you should still end up with a nice beer.

 

How warm was your wort when you took a gravity reading? Warmer wort will give you a lower O.G. I think the recommended temperature (assuming your using a hydrometer) is around 68-65 F

 

Hmm, it sounds like you're describing steeping specialty grains, and that could impact the SG by a few points.

It sounds like you're a little unsure of the process, so let me tell you how I do it (or used to, anyway, when I did extract-plus-specialty grains brews) and maybe that'll help clarify. I usually put the grains in a paint bag or muslin bag, heat the water to the appropriate temp (usually around 154F, it will say in the recipe) and hold it there for 15-30 minutes. Then you lift the bag out and let drain, and finally you rinse it with 170F water--the rinse is sometimes called 'sparging.' One important aspect of the process is that you don't want the water to get too hot, or you will extract tanins from the grain that can taste unpleasant. You definitely don't want to boil or simmer. You're not cooking the grain. With the crystal malt, you're just allowing sugars that were created in the malting process to leach out. With the Munich, ideally you want the grain to actually mash--ie, you hold it at a specific temperature, usually between 149-154F for 15-30 minutes, that allows enzymes in the grain to convert starches to sugar. So, in this case, if you did not hold at mashing temperatures for an adequate length of time, that would account for some lost gravity points. If so, don't worry about it. The beer will probably be OK, just different than you expected, and you learned something for next time. Brewing's a constant learning process, and fortunately, even the less than perfect brews often taste pretty damn good!