brian_muz
Brewer
I've been trying to dial in my equipment profile over my last couple of brews and I'm scratching my head to work out where I'm out.
My setup
I have an electric digiboil which I use as a HLT
I have a plastic Gatorade cooler which I use with a BIAB bag for mashing - There is zero dead space as a result
I batch sparge and then squeeze the grain bag
I have a standard stainless steel boil kettle which I heat over gas - I lose 2 litres when I train this
On my last brew my numbers were:
Post mash gravity - 1.047 predicted - 1.051 actual (so I was a little ahead at this stage)
Pre boil volume - 28.17 predicted - 29.5 actual (I'm guessing I got a little more water through bag squeezing?)
Batch size is set at 19 but I ended up with 20.5 (So I think my evaporation rate is right but I still had ~1.5 litres additional water from the start
OG - 1.068 predicted - 1.063 actual.
Looking at this now two things don't make a lot of sense to me:
1) Given I have no dead space in my mash tun where did the additional 1.5 litres come from? Is this just bag squeezing?
2) My gravity was a little above prediction pre boil and my evaporation rate seems to have been dead on. Why then have I gone from 4 points up pre boil to 5 points down post?
My recipe did call from 0.45kg of honey with 15 mins to go in the boil but I'd assume the calculations for this in terms of impact on gravity would be pretty accurate.
Any other thoughts?
My setup
I have an electric digiboil which I use as a HLT
I have a plastic Gatorade cooler which I use with a BIAB bag for mashing - There is zero dead space as a result
I batch sparge and then squeeze the grain bag
I have a standard stainless steel boil kettle which I heat over gas - I lose 2 litres when I train this
On my last brew my numbers were:
Post mash gravity - 1.047 predicted - 1.051 actual (so I was a little ahead at this stage)
Pre boil volume - 28.17 predicted - 29.5 actual (I'm guessing I got a little more water through bag squeezing?)
Batch size is set at 19 but I ended up with 20.5 (So I think my evaporation rate is right but I still had ~1.5 litres additional water from the start
OG - 1.068 predicted - 1.063 actual.
Looking at this now two things don't make a lot of sense to me:
1) Given I have no dead space in my mash tun where did the additional 1.5 litres come from? Is this just bag squeezing?
2) My gravity was a little above prediction pre boil and my evaporation rate seems to have been dead on. Why then have I gone from 4 points up pre boil to 5 points down post?
My recipe did call from 0.45kg of honey with 15 mins to go in the boil but I'd assume the calculations for this in terms of impact on gravity would be pretty accurate.
Any other thoughts?