philipCT
Brewniversity student
- Joined
- May 10, 2013
- Messages
- 771
- Reaction score
- 171
Something went wrong here.
I scaled a Honey Pale Ale recipe down based on expected efficiencies and also to lower the ABV to about 6.2%. What ended up happening is that before I had collected sufficient wort, the SG of the runnings went down to 1.008 so I had to stop collecting or risk high tannins. So I was only able to collect 11 gallons and my target was 12.85 pre-boil.
At that point, I made a judgement call and topped the BK up to 12.85 with leftover sparge water that was fully treated. I measured the new pre-boil SG at 1.048. Final post-boil vol came to 11 galls and the OG measured 1.058, pretty much dead-on the expected 1.059.
Would you have done the same?
And then there's the honey...
You can add honey to a brew at different times. I decided to pasteurize and add into Primary to retain as much honey character as possible from the locally sourced raw honey.
I ended up pasteurizing and adding the honey without diluting it after about 16 hours of fermentation when High Krausen was in full swing. I did not dilute it because I was just done with the whole complicated process. It took hours just to pasteurize the honey - I wasn't about to spend another hour or two treating, boiling and cooling 1.7 gallons of dilution water. AND I didn't really want to dilute the beer that much (especially when I had already added about 1.6 galls of sparge water pre-boil).
Anyone have any honey experiences/thoughts about this?
So, in the end, I might have well NOT added water pre-boil, and just waited for the honey addition to add that volume of water. I suppose the yeast may have been shocked to encounter some super hi grav, undiluted honey to work on, so diluting it to an SG that would have matched the OG of the wort might have made sense.
Maybe I'll try that next time.
Bottom line, since my plan was always to add the honey in at Primary, it seems my BeerSmith predictions were off throughout the brewing process. Not sure what to do about this as it seems now that BeerSmith just doesn't know how to model this process (adding fermentables into Primary). I had the honey in my list of ingredients, and the BS assumption was that it would be added to the boil and all relevant calculations reflect that. But, of course, if you don't add the honey in the boil, it's a whole different story.
Not sure what to do about this next time. Maybe modify how I put the recipe into BS and just model vols and OG's "by hand".
Anyone else face these issue working with honey or other fermentables added during fermentation?
I scaled a Honey Pale Ale recipe down based on expected efficiencies and also to lower the ABV to about 6.2%. What ended up happening is that before I had collected sufficient wort, the SG of the runnings went down to 1.008 so I had to stop collecting or risk high tannins. So I was only able to collect 11 gallons and my target was 12.85 pre-boil.
At that point, I made a judgement call and topped the BK up to 12.85 with leftover sparge water that was fully treated. I measured the new pre-boil SG at 1.048. Final post-boil vol came to 11 galls and the OG measured 1.058, pretty much dead-on the expected 1.059.
Would you have done the same?
And then there's the honey...
You can add honey to a brew at different times. I decided to pasteurize and add into Primary to retain as much honey character as possible from the locally sourced raw honey.
I ended up pasteurizing and adding the honey without diluting it after about 16 hours of fermentation when High Krausen was in full swing. I did not dilute it because I was just done with the whole complicated process. It took hours just to pasteurize the honey - I wasn't about to spend another hour or two treating, boiling and cooling 1.7 gallons of dilution water. AND I didn't really want to dilute the beer that much (especially when I had already added about 1.6 galls of sparge water pre-boil).
Anyone have any honey experiences/thoughts about this?
So, in the end, I might have well NOT added water pre-boil, and just waited for the honey addition to add that volume of water. I suppose the yeast may have been shocked to encounter some super hi grav, undiluted honey to work on, so diluting it to an SG that would have matched the OG of the wort might have made sense.
Maybe I'll try that next time.
Bottom line, since my plan was always to add the honey in at Primary, it seems my BeerSmith predictions were off throughout the brewing process. Not sure what to do about this as it seems now that BeerSmith just doesn't know how to model this process (adding fermentables into Primary). I had the honey in my list of ingredients, and the BS assumption was that it would be added to the boil and all relevant calculations reflect that. But, of course, if you don't add the honey in the boil, it's a whole different story.
Not sure what to do about this next time. Maybe modify how I put the recipe into BS and just model vols and OG's "by hand".
Anyone else face these issue working with honey or other fermentables added during fermentation?
