Ok, I've been thinking about my first AG brew and trying to figure out why my OG was low.

I formulated the recipe as a 2.5 gallon recipe, hoping to get 2.25 gal into the LBK. I used 3 gallons of water and did BIAB. I used 1 gallon of sparge water, just poured over the grain bag. After the mash and boil I had about 2.25 gallons of wort, maybe a little more. I poured it all into the LBK and it's fermenting away.

First off, there is every chance I did something wrong and just had bad efficiency. I prolly didn't do the sparge right but I'm not going to sparge next time, I'll just do a mash out and stir the grain until I get to 170* to help wash off the sugars.

But it makes me question if I am doing everything right as far as recipe making. The recipe doesn't care how much water i use or boil away right? When I say I want a 2.75 gal batch and it gives me the OG based on the amount of grain and efficiency I have put in, it doesn't matter if I get to 2.75 gallons with a 1.5qt/lb mash and sparge or 4 gal BiaB right?

I guess I just need to work at this a little more. I do have another AG brew planned for next weekend. Recipe is based on 2.75 gal batch and I plan on doing BiaB no sparge with 4 gallons of water to start with. We will see if I get closer to my numbers.

What was the grain bill and what was the OG?

Style: American Pale Ale
Batch: 2.50 galAll Grain

Characteristics
---------------
Recipe Gravity: 1.059 OG
Recipe Bitterness: 29 IBU
Recipe Color: 6° SRM
Estimated FG: 1.015
Alcohol by Volume: 5.7%
Alcohol by Weight: 4.5%

Ingredients
-----------
CaraPils 0.25 lb, Grain, Mashed
Crystal 20L 0.25 lb, Grain, Mashed
Two-row (US) 5.00 lb, Grain, Mashed
Vienna (US) 0.25 lb, Grain, Mashed

Cascade 0.30 oz, Pellet, 7 minutes
Cascade 0.30 oz, Pellet, 20 minutes
Cascade 0.40 oz, Pellet, 60 minutes

English Ale yeast 1.00 unit, Yeast, Danstar Nottingham



I came away with 1.048 as my OG. I think it was 55% efficiency. Qbrew above is based on 70%.

I don't even really know what I am asking lol.

I'm going to do another brew with a different recipe and different technique and see if I still have the same issue. If I do, I'll worry more about it then. There were enough things that could have gone wrong with this last brew (too hot on the mash, improper sparging, old grain, etc) that it may not be anything big.

Give us more details of your process, maybe we can figure out what went wrong. Any and all details might help, so include everything you can think of.

a lot of brewers spend a lot of time determining their water:grist ratio... basically, it's a ratio of quarts or water to every pound of grain. most shoot for a ratio of anywhere between 1:1 and 1.5:1... somewhere between 1 and 1.5 quarts of strike water per pound of grain in the grain bill.

for BIABers, though... water:grist ratio is pretty much irrelevant... and, there's pretty much no difference in efficiency if you use 1 qt water:pound of grain, or four qts water:pound of grain.

this is leading me to think it was just bad efficiency... this was the stovetop batch that you mashed at 160° F while keeping the heat on while mashing? if you took the temp on the surface and it came out to 160° F, i would imagine at the bottom of the pot, closer to the heat, was closer to 170° F, maybe even 180°... and a lot of the enzymes got denatured, leading to bad conversion and less sugars to extract.

especially since it was your first time with a new process, don't sweat it. you have a better idea of the process now... and you'll keep learning how to dial everything in with every batch you do...

i don't do a mash out, and i don't sparge when i do my stovetop BIAB batches... everything seems to work fine. i get beer... and it tastes good. i only measure OG, and don't calculate efficieny. i can tell when the mash has converted, then i just drain the bag and start the boil. i'm not worried about efficiency, so long as the mash has converted, and whatever the OG is ok by me... it'll be beer. if i want to start taking more measurements and calculate efficiency and all that, i can... i have my process down, so making little adjustments will be easy. get the process down, then make the adjustments to fine tune everything... that's my advice.

I think you are right chunk...i'm going to do another AG with a free fall mash and see where I get before I start worrying.

That brew WAS planned for this weekend but BMW doesn't like to ship stuff so it will be next weekend before I get to it. I'll check back in then.

I think Chunk gave you some good advice. Do a few brews and look for trends, good or bad. Then adjust.

yup, no need to make changes or react after just one batch.

Pretty sure it wasn't mentioned yet, but what temperature did you measure your OG at, and did you calibrate or adjust for that?

For example, if you measured 1.048 and the sample was 90 deg F, then your actual OG is 1.052 according to this: http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/hydrometer.html

It would have to be really hot to reach 1.059 after adjustment (that page puts it around 120 deg), but unless you cooled that sample to calibration temperature chances are you had better efficiency than you thought.