eddiewould
Apprentice
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2012
- Messages
- 12
- Reaction score
- 0
Hey guys,
My setup is roughly as follows:
Rubbermaid 10 gallon cooler w/ false bottom, 5 gallon brew pot. I have a somewhat hacky fly-sprage setup whereby I fill my fermenter bucket with sparge water (say, 75c). I put it high up on a table. Connected to the fermenter bucket tap is a silicone pipe made into a ring with a T connector, there are lots of little holes in the pipe to allow water to dribble out. The ring is suspended above my mash tun, dribbling onto the top of my grain-bed (at a rate of about half a litre per minute). I try and keep an inch of water above my grainbed.
I take gravity readings of the runnings at regular intervals (pipette a small volume onto a refractometer).
It starts off very slightly below my OG, then increases to slightly above my OG, then tapers down from there. Problem is it gets down lowish quite quickly - I end up drawing a lot of wort at around 1.015. I'd normally stop at 1.010 however I gave up yesterday. The wort drawn does not taste astringent.
To try and summarize my problem: I'm currently ending up with a larger volume of lower gravity wort. So to hit the pre-boil gravity the recipe calls for, I end up doing a longer boil (say an extra 30-45 minutes), before doing any hop additions. From there, everything is fine. Is there something I can change to my process/equipment to end up with a smaller volume of higher gravity wort? So that I can avoid the extra boiling to hit the pre-boil gravity?
Hopefully this makes sense to someone.
Eddie
My setup is roughly as follows:
Rubbermaid 10 gallon cooler w/ false bottom, 5 gallon brew pot. I have a somewhat hacky fly-sprage setup whereby I fill my fermenter bucket with sparge water (say, 75c). I put it high up on a table. Connected to the fermenter bucket tap is a silicone pipe made into a ring with a T connector, there are lots of little holes in the pipe to allow water to dribble out. The ring is suspended above my mash tun, dribbling onto the top of my grain-bed (at a rate of about half a litre per minute). I try and keep an inch of water above my grainbed.
I take gravity readings of the runnings at regular intervals (pipette a small volume onto a refractometer).
It starts off very slightly below my OG, then increases to slightly above my OG, then tapers down from there. Problem is it gets down lowish quite quickly - I end up drawing a lot of wort at around 1.015. I'd normally stop at 1.010 however I gave up yesterday. The wort drawn does not taste astringent.
To try and summarize my problem: I'm currently ending up with a larger volume of lower gravity wort. So to hit the pre-boil gravity the recipe calls for, I end up doing a longer boil (say an extra 30-45 minutes), before doing any hop additions. From there, everything is fine. Is there something I can change to my process/equipment to end up with a smaller volume of higher gravity wort? So that I can avoid the extra boiling to hit the pre-boil gravity?
Hopefully this makes sense to someone.
Eddie