Any possibilities to save my first all grain brew?

[Hemavol]

Hey,

I have brewed my very first all grain brew one week ago.. and it is not going very well. I am still very newbie to the brewgame, I only have one brew from extract under my belt but that went very well. So I wanted to hop in to the all grain party for my second brew and it is not going well... I have been reading a lot of forum discussions, watching a lot of youtube videos etc.. related to brewing. I am type of a person that once I get excited.. there is nothing stopping me from trying to learn as much as I can.

But anyway, the first problem was that my OG was quite low (1042) and the estimated OG for my recipe (with 75% Efficiency) was 1048. So we can say that all ready there something went totally wrong.

If I would have to analyze this myself, I would say that I mashed too high temp and probably messed up something during the sparging.

Well now jumping to the actual problem is that after 7 days the activity of the airlock is completely stopped and I have measured the FG today and couple days back and both times the FG was 1020, so I think to myself that the fermenting is done. So why I am thinking that something went wrong during the mashing would be that there is too many unfermentable sugars in the wort. The estimated FG for the recipe is 1008

Couple days back I stirred the wort gently and moved i to a hotter environment, but it seems it has not affected the FG at all. I have also now pitched a little more yeast today, but I doubt it will make any difference.

So the actual question for this topic:
Should I dump the wort and start all over? This is something that I would not like to do, since the wort is tasting quite ok/good.

Or should I do something else, what? I am thinking that should I add DME to raise the ABV, let it ferment, dry hop and bottle. I cannot brew a new batch and mix this to the new, because I do not have the ingredients for this recipe anymore, so that option is out. If I would add DME, is there any guide that how much should I add? Since I do not know how I could calculate the effect from this point.

Recipe:
Batch Size: 11 liters
Boil Size: 12.5 liters
Est OG 1048
Est FG 1008

Grain Bill:
1kg - Belgian Wheat
0.75kg - Pilsner Malt
0.5kg - Acidulated Malt
0.1kg - Rice Hulls

Yeast: Safale - K97

Fermenting temp for first 3 days was 17celsius degrees and when I moved it to wormer room, it was 22 celsius degrees.

Mashing process: 60mins mash (65 Celsius degrees) without Acidulated Malt. +45min mash added Acidulated Malt (65 Celsius degrees)

Sparge water temp 76 Celsius degrees.

Due to my poor stove (For brewing purposes) I noticed that the measured temperature for the mash was not stable all the time.. but I tried to keep it under 67 celsius degrees.. but I feel that this is where all failed for me.

 

[Hemavol]

And just to add, I did infusion mash. So I added the grains to a certain temp. I am thinking that maybe in the future it is more safer to add the grains and just heat the temp to desired temperature and keep it there for the mashing period.

 

[Amadeo38]

Your mash temp seems spot on, as does your sparge temp, assuming your thermometer is accurate and you are using a calibrated hydrometer for FG measurements, not a refractometer. Those mash and sparge temps should not create too many unfermentable sugars. Which suggests this is a yeast health issue.

Did you aerate the chilled wort before pitching the yeast? What was your yeast pitching procedure (e.g. did you rehydrate and how, and at what temp did you pitch it into wort)? What’s your cleaning and sanitation procedure? Those factors can affect yeast health and production as well.

To answer your other question, I wouldn’t dump it. If it tastes good as you say, I’d let it sit at the 22C temp with another pitch of an alcohol tolerant yeast for a week or more, then measure with a hydrometer one more time. If it’s still stable, and you like the flavor, bottle it and choke down the semi-sweet beer. Not gonna hurt you.

Lastly, the mashing procedure you performed is the common one (heating the water to a higher temp, pouring in the grains so that the temp drops to 65C). You can certainly add the grains to cool water and heat it to mash temp, but you’ve got to stir fairly constantly to prevent grain scorching on the bottom of the kettle. Look into BIAB (brew in a bag) method, as it’s a fun and easy intermediate from extract to all-grain that you might have success with.

Cheers

 

[hottpeper13]

If you turned on the heat to raise the temp with the grains in the pot, and did not stir constantly you most likely denatured most of the enzymes. You could try pitching a diastaticus strain of yeast,I believe white labs has plenty. I had a brown ale that was mashed at 156 and it stuck at 1.034 (OG 1.070) so I pitched a starter of The Yeast Bay Belgian Dry at high krausen,and it went down to 1.010. It's very dry now and has lost all of it's chocolate flavor and has a slight Belgian phenolic flavor. Careful what you wish for. Hoping time is my friend,and if not will have to blend.

 

[Soulshine2]

being .006 off your OG isnt terrible,its entirely possible you just didnt boil off enough. what was your pre-boil gravity? . I wouldnt worry yet at 7 days in. Its just stuck for some reason. I wouldnt add anything fermentable or it'll just set you back more and possibly invite an infection. let it ride another week . I had 1 brew go a week and be stagnant like yours then 17 days before it finished out. be patient. dont toss it ,its not infected. worst case its just low alcohol .

 

[Hemavol]

Thanks for your responses. I stirred almost all that 105min of time, so the grains and the watter in the kettle was moving and changing place. Did not use too much force on that either.

I use digital thermometer, which should be working fine. Also I use hydrometer and tested it with plain water before the gravity check and it showed 0 like it should.

I pitched the yeast actually directly to the fermenter and then I shaked the fermenter vigorously for about 30secs. I guess I did not shake long enough also and this was something I will change for future. I will buy paint stirring tool you can attach to a drill and will aerate in a future with that, no need to shake the fermenter as a whole. Does this sound a good idea?

The second pitch I did today was following. I sanitized a glass with boiling water and added couple tablespoons of DME to the glass and 25+ celsius degree water, pitched the yeast there, stirred and I let that sit for 20mins. Then I pitched this to the fermenter without shaking the fermenter or anything.

 

[Hemavol]

I also did not ditch the sample I took today. I poured it in to a glass and added some extra yeast there also, without anything else. I will check the gravity from that sample on Sunday again. PS. I have not changed the yeast for any of these steps. Still using the same K97.

 

[Soulshine2]

Thanks for your responses. I stirred almost all that 105min of time, so the grains and the watter in the kettle was moving and changing place. Did not use too much force on that either.

I use digital thermometer, which should be working fine. Also I use hydrometer and tested it with plain water before the gravity check and it showed 0 like it should.

I pitched the yeast actually directly to the fermenter and then I shaked the fermenter vigorously for about 30secs. I guess I did not shake long enough also and this was something I will change for future. I will buy paint stirring tool you can attach to a drill and will aerate in a future with that, no need to shake the fermenter as a whole. Does this sound a good idea?

The second pitch I did today was following. I sanitized a glass with boiling water and added couple tablespoons of DME to the glass and 25+ celsius degree water, pitched the yeast there, stirred and I let that sit for 20mins. Then I pitched this to the fermenter without shaking the fermenter or anything.

the whole wort aeration is a big debatable issue. I personally dont go to great extremes to aerate. I just do a hard trickle from kettle to carboy and have never had trouble ,except for the one time and it was a liquid yeast that came to me 3 days late and warm . No violent shaking nor paint stir necessary. I've always pretty much hit my gravity numbers within .002 or spot on.
Other brewers go to great lengths of oxygen bottles ,aquarium pumps,etc and a big to do about it. I dont see the advantage of it.
My personal opinion, Youre asking for an infection .
If you follow the directions on the yeast packet itself about pitching temperatures and optimal fermentation temps ,as long as you hit your gravities or at least close, everything should work to result in a more than just drinkable beer.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

But anyway, the first problem was that my OG was quite low (1042) and the estimated OG for my recipe (with 75% Efficiency) was 1048. So we can say that all ready there something went totally wrong.

Not at all - it's pretty normal to get efficiencies in the 60%s (or worse!) for your first all-grain brew. There's always little things that you don't quite get right the first time. Don't sweat the OG - it's totally normal.

Grain Bill:
1kg - Belgian Wheat
0.75kg - Pilsner Malt
0.5kg - Acidulated Malt
0.1kg - Rice Hulls

Yeast: Safale - K97

OK - 21% acidulated malt is...unusual. Do you have super-alkaline water? In which case you were probably getting very little enzyme activity in the mash before youadded the acidulated malt. And just generally, for your first brew I'd keep it as simple as possible, which means I wouldn't have used so much wheat if any.

As for aeration - you don't really need to worry about it with dry yeast, yeast only need oxygen to make sterols for their cell walls, and dry yeast come preloaded with sterols in their cell walls.

 

[Hemavol]

No, just plain tap water. But I live in Finland so we have very pure water here. It is more purer then some of the waters you can buy from store, if that makes any difference. 20% Acidulated malt, because this was more or less "Wannabe Gose" recipe. I love tart beers, but I see that making a gose without some actual bacteria (lacto or something else or mix) is more or less waste of time and money. But it is what it is.

 

[cactusgarrett]

Sounds like it's a classic "stuck fermentation", so look up some threads on that. As such there's a few things going on here:

Could be a mash pH issue, since the water was pristine and 20% acidulated malt was used.
Could be yeast health - no info on age of the yeast. As NB suggested, I wouldn't consider aeration an issue, especially with dry yeast.
Mash temp won't affect Original Gravity, but that's secondary to the high FG issue. Regarding missing your OG target (which wasn't a miss by much, so don't worry about that), that could be something like how fine your grain was milled. Something to look into in the future if it continues to be an issue.

 

[Hemavol]

Thank you all for your responses. Hard to say what is the case here, but like I mentioned I added little bit more yeast last Friday and the FG is still near the same (around 1017-18, hard to say exact). This also concludes the fact that I also need to get better hydrometer. I will let it go for 1 week since I dryhopped today, cold crash and check the FG and bottle.

 

[histo320]

On all of my brews I always keep some DME handy in case I miss my Est Pre-Boil gravity.

If you are milling your own grain look into conditioning your grain. I do it and it helped my efficiency but not near as much as water chemistry has.

 

[Bovronius]

I'd probably stop messing with it so often and leave it be, see what it ends up at in a week or so and take it for what it is. More often you go digging in the wort the higher the chance you get an infection.

Are you using a refractometer to get those measurements?

If so your beer is sitting at 4.65 ABV

If you're using a float you're sitting at 2.89%

 

[Hemavol]

I'd probably stop messing with it so often and leave it be, see what it ends up at in a week or so and take it for what it is. More often you go digging in the wort the higher the chance you get an infection.

Are you using a refractometer to get those measurements?

If so your beer is sitting at 4.65 ABV

If you're using a float you're sitting at 2.89%

Yea, it has been sitting since Friday without touching it at all.

I am using Hydrometer. Where does this ABV argument base on? Sorry I am just asking, where does this big of a difference come from, since both are just ways to measure alcohol content. I am a newbie, so bare with me if I do not know the answer.

 

[Bovronius]

Refractometers have a calculation that needs to be done for gravity once alcohol is into the equation because alcohol refracts light differently than sugars, refractometers were made with the intent on measuring strictly sugar levels in water, but people much smarter than me figured out the way to calculate what your true gravity is once you have alcohol in there based on your OG and Current or FG.

Floating Hydrometers are accurate as long as the temperature is constant regardless of alcohol vs sugar.

I didn't know what type of instrument you were measuring with so I did the calculations for both.

 

[Hemavol]

Bottled the beer today and FG is staying at the same 1018 range, so will be session / low abv beer but atleast the sample is tasting good so it can be quite ok summer drink. I hope I will not see any bottle bombs, but since I have measured the FG so many times, I am feeling quite safe.

I will update this thread one last time for the tasting.

 

[jrgtr42]

As others have said, the OG isn't really anything to worry about - there's a lot of reasons it could have been low.
For the FG, there's something going on there, but without a ton of details about your procedures, it'd be tough to find out what.
I would probably recommend doing something simple for the next all-grain brew - maybe a pale ale, use only 1 grain, pale malt, marris otter, Pils or some such, then fairly light hopping rate.
Something like that is pretty foolproof, as far as making beer goes. just make sure your procedures and measurements are on spot before brewing.
For the thermometer, check it in freezing water (crush a bunch of ice, put it in a glass with water to fill it up, make sure the thermometer reads 0. Then boil water and make sure it reads 100 * (those are celsius, of course... sub 32 and 212 if you want Fahrenheit.)
Sounds like you calibrated the hydrometer too - and also make sure when you're measuring your gravities, it's at fermenting temp - around 18*C (65*F) The wort being much higher can affect the readings.

 

[Hemavol]

Just to more or less close this thread, I feel I have solved the issue and I think it is related to the sparging part and maybe the single infusion method.. I think I have diluted the earlier batch with sparging too much or something. All though I am not sure would that explain the FG. The beer turned out to be quite good anyway, actually very good. So I cannot be fully disapointed. Low ABV is nothing to worry anyway.

Anyway I did a new brew today (IPA) and everything worked out fine. I used BIAB method and step mashing. I am missing only couple of points from the recipe calculators OG (which anyway can throw off couple points here and there). So I would say that this brew worked out fine. Let's see how it turns out. I will definitely try out the earlier recipe again at some point with these new learned steps.