First batch has left me with questions?!?!?!

[rgalvin]

OK, So i brewed my first 5 gallon batch. I did a pretty simple wheat beer using 2 cans of Coopers wheat beer extract. I used my hydrometer for the first time and it looked like 1.04. It was bubbling in 12 hours, brown foam coming out of the airlock within 24 hours and the lid on the fermenter was hard and bent upward, it settled down after 3-4 days.
I left it in the primary for 15 days then bottled. FG reading was 1.02, which according to the chart I was using would give a very low ABV, 2.5%
The temp in my fermenter started around 72, dropped to 66 and went back up to 68 over the two weeks.
I only used one of the yeast packs, one came with each can.
So my questions are basically, should I have used both yeast packs? Is this ABV what I should be expecting? Is the temp change a problem? Or is all this normal and I am worrying too much!
I didn't taste bad, king of weak and water but looked nice and smelled great!

Hopefully I gave enough info to point me in the right direction!

Also, how long should I carbonated, 2 weeks?

Thanks for your help! I need it!

 

[BrewPharm]

Carbonate at least 2-3 weeks. The calculated abv of around 2.65 seems quite low. The final gravity was hopefully lower and you just misread it. Or misread the og. What was the target og and fg in the kit? The temp fluctuations should not matter too much with an ale yeast and the time you gave it was plenty to complete fermentation. You might want to wait a bit longer just to let the beer clear next time.

 

[freisste]

I'm going to say there is about a 90% chance that the OG was correctly read, but that sample was taken from the wort without completely mixing it. So likely the actual OG was higher than 1.040. Someone with a recipe builder like beer smith or hopville can tell you for sure. Extract is about 99% predictable.

Also, your reading of the FG is likely correct as well. It is very common for extract brews to end up around 1.020. If you search "curse of 1.020 FG" (or something similar) you will find myriad examples of people whose brews ended there.

No issues, I'm sure your beer will be great.

 

[davekippen]

Did you do a full boil or did you top off with water? If you topped off with water, there is a good chance your wort was not mixed well and threw off the hydro reading to the low side. 1.040 would seem a little low, but I have never used coopers. The FG seems a little high too but again, 1.020 is not super outta whack.

Sounds like you had great fermentation with a lot of krausen and pressure. One pack of dry yeast is almost always enough for a normal 5 gallon batch.

 

[davekippen]

I'm going to say there is about a 90% chance that the OG was correctly read, but that sample was taken from the wort without completely mixing it. So likely the actual OG was higher than 1.040. Someone with a recipe builder like beer smith or hopville can tell you for sure. Extract is about 99% predictable.

Also, your reading of the FG is likely correct as well. It is very common for extract brews to end up around 1.020. If you search "curse of 1.020 FG" (or something similar) you will find myriad examples of people whose brews ended there.

No issues, I'm sure your beer will be great.

You beat me to it!

 

[BigFloyd]

Also, how long should I carbonated, 2 weeks?

You ought to give it 3-4 weeks to carb/condition at 70-72*F. Longer at cooler temps. At least 3 days in the fridge helps a lot too.

 

[jmh286]

Post the recipe and I'll run it through Beersmith and give you a better estimate of your OG

 

[mvcorliss]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet but if you had "brown foam" in your airlock and the cover of your fermenter was bending out ward you were soooo close to having the top blow off the fermenter and beer all over your ceiling! What happened was your airlock became clogged by the krausen (sp?) and the co2 had nowhere to go. You need, at the very least, to remove and clean out the airlock. Even better would be to rig up a blow off tube. Wheat beers especially are famous for vigorous fermentation.

 

[rgalvin]

I was more careful with the FG reading so if one is off my guess would be the OG,

the recipe on the can said to add the wort concentrate to 2 gals of boiling water with 500g light dry malt extract, The people at my LHBS told me it would taste better if i used a second can of wort concentrate instead of the DME so that is what i did, so i do not know what the OG and FG readsing should have been.

2 cans of Coopers brewmaster wheat boiled in 1 gal of water. 4 gals of water in fermenter.
Thanks for the help!