Best way to measure water...

Hello my fellow brewers, I'm fairly new to all-grain and I have a question. Please excuse me if it has been answered before.
In most AG recipes I've seen,that they'll say to add a specific amount of water,for example...mash in 13.44 qts,mash out 7.53 qts. My question is how am I suppose to measure out the the .44 or .53? Do I weigh out the water?

Beerzilla81 said:

Hello my fellow brewers, I'm fairly new to all-grain and I have a question. Please excuse me if it has been answered before.
In most AG recipes I've seen,that they'll say to add a specific amount of water,for example...mash in 13.44 qts,mash out 7.53 qts. My question is how am I suppose to measure out the the .44 or .53? Do I weigh out the water?

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In my experience, in most cases extreme accuracy measuring liquid volumes is not necessary to brew good beer.

If it says 13.44 quarts, just round up to 13.5.
7.53 quarts, round down to 7.5.

There are far too many other process variables in home brewing to obsess about liquid volumes measured out to 2 decimal places.

Thank you, I was worried about that. Cheers!

Sometimes you will see odd numbers in a recipe if it was cut down from a much larger batch volume.

No worries!

I agree with processhead, but I suggest that getting your volumes accurate to the nearest quart is good enough. There is no advantage to refining water volumes to a greater degree.

In actual practice, mabrungard is probably right about accuracy to the nearest quart.
Especially with larger batch sizes of >= 5 gallons.

I usually round up anyway so I can draw off a .5 gal for starters. I "calibrated" an aluminum yard stick in my keggle and just get close! A sight glass from Bobby is in my future but I'll be damned if I don't keep making really good beer without it! I quit caring about nailing my numbers-any numbers really-a while ago. Hmmm, my OG was a few points off, interesting. This recipe calls for 2 oz of whole dry hops...the rest of this package looks pretty close! Still tasty!

I use a 2 qt container that I marked the sides in 1/2 Qt increments. I used a 2 cup measuring cup to do it. I also use a homedepot bucket marked in 1 gal increments.

Yeah, Don't get hung up on exact measurements. A certain degree of tolerance is acceptable. Just get it close enough.

But if you are short collecting your total wort, just heat up some more water and mash out a 2nd or 3rd time.