My brew may need saving! (Or it might be fine....)

Brew day was a bit of a mess on this last one. It's my first partial mash, and I intended to follow DeathBrewer's Easy Partial Mash method. Instead, I managed to make every newbie mistake I could manage.

I mashed in 2 gallons, and got the temperature up to ~162 before adding the grains, expecting the cooler grains would drop the temperature down to the right level. After five minutes or so, I stirred, measured the temperature, and found that it was still 162! So, thinking on my feet, and not wanting to denature any enzymes, I added cold water until the temperature was 155. I thought I had saved my mash.

Then 5 minutes later, I stir again, and the temperature is now 140. Not sure if I didn't stir properly before the previous reading, or if the grains finally cooled the liquid, or what. I ended up playing with the stove settings, constantly stirring, and hoping to get the right temperature.

After about an hour and a half of failing at mashing, I got impatient and moved onto the next step. I needed to finish the brew soon and get to bed before an early morning climbing trip, so I just hoped that over the course of the 90 minutes, <i>some</i> amylase activity would have occurred. Besides, the mash water tasted sweet, so maybe it really did work.

But when I measured the gravity after the boil, it came in at just under 1.030, when I was expecting close to 160. This is supposed to be a heavy amber ale, and I used 4lbs liquid extract, so how could the gravity be so low unless I screwed up the mash?

Regardless, I took a RDWHAHB attitude, pitched the yeast, and let it sit for two weeks. I later found that hydrometer readings can fail if the brew isn't totally mixed, and I don't specifically remember if I stirred before measuring, so I figured that was probably what happened.

But now I'm out of homebrew, so I'm starting to worry. I just transferred to secondary, and the beer smells great, it's a nice medium amber color, but it tastes very thin. It tastes like grain-flavored water, with no backbone. The gravity is at 1.004, and I can't tell how much alcohol there is.

Do you think my brew will be fine? Do you think it will suck? I have extra malt extract, should I boil it up and add it to the secondary just in case? Should I toss something else in to make sure it's got a body? Should I just not touch it and pray to the beer gods?

Based on your numbers your ABV would be 3.4%

You probably did not mix your boil and top off water properly so you ABV is probably much higher but no way to tell without an accurate hydro reading.

Your beer fermented very dry so the majority of your mash probably converted in the 140 range cause a highly fermentable wort. We don't know how efficient your mash was because again, we are not sure what the starting OG was. The low mash temps caused the fermentation to go to a very low gravity.

Its still way too early to know how your beer will taste but I have made every mistake you mentioned in your post and still had good beer so you are probably fine. Its a lot harder than you think to mess up your beer.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm sure my beer isn't "ruined", but I'm not sure if I can do something to improve it, since it's at such a low gravity compared to what I was hoping for.

Other than the "thin" taste, the flavor is fine - it's got a nice but subtle toasty chocolate flavor, and the hops flavors came out really well. It'll be drinkable, but I'd like to see if I can get it beyond that. Would boiling and adding the last two pounds of amber extract help, or would that just be too much? Is there anything else I could add that would be a less crude solution?

It is still beer. If it smells good and tastes good I would cinsider it a success. If you decide to add more extract be sure to add it to some boiling water and add, do not reboil your beer. Of course that will restart fermentation and you will have to give it more time. I would say though to leave it be, drink it, and concentrate of fixing any goofs from this batch on the next one.

As I said in my earlier post we don't really know what the alcohol content is. You got a really good conversion from your mash, that is why it fermented to such a low gravity. I think you got a low OG reading because it was not mixed thoroughly. The reason it has a thin or watery mouthfeel is because it fermented very dry not because it has no alcohol. A thin beer can be a really crisp and refreshing beer. I'd let it ride.

Heh, "crisp and refreshing" is totally not what I was going for! And I think the flavor profile doesn't lend itself to that, either.

I've found that other people add maltodextrin after mashing at too low of a temperature to get the body back up, and I'm thinking I'll do the same. I might add a bit of DME as well, to try and reinforce the backbone grain flavor, but otherwise I think the maltodextrin should solve my problems and make this into a pretty good beer.