Batch size shrank a lot but gravity is good

McAvinbrew · Mar 6, 2016

Hello Folks,

So today I decided to break in my new brew 15 gallon kettle with a nice witbier with orange and coriander. Unfortunately I have ended up somewhere Ive never been before. I just racked the wort into my primary fermemter and I only have 17 litres of wort instead of 19. I started the batch off with 21 litres of water in the kettle and everything seemed to be going well until I racked and my final batch size is 2 litres under. The thing is that the gravity is 1.046 when the target was 1.047 so I cant really add more water or my gravity will fall out of range.
Im not really sure what my next course of action should be, Should I just ferment what I have and take the loss as it is or is there some way I can bring up the batch size without affecting the beer.

Im also curious how this even happened, so any pointer to prevent it again would be great.

Any advice is welcome.

Thanks.

Ozarks Mountain Brewery · Mar 6, 2016

just leave it and enjoy your beer, you could boil dme and add to it but that might take some time

sbaclimber · Mar 6, 2016

My first question would be...are the 19l. @ 1.047 purely calculated or are they based on previous experiences with "your system"?
In other words, is the new kettle the only variable you introduced into the system?
A 4l. boil-off hour is pretty normal (assuming a 60min boil), so I am thinking something else might have been off if you were targeting only 2l. ...

PS, regardless.... what OMB said! You hit the target (OG), don't muck with it. The 2l. "loss" can be attributed to any number of things...DWHAHB.

Ozarks Mountain Brewery · Mar 6, 2016

the wider the pot the more boil off rate happens so either change the settings for more losses or cover your lid half way while boiling, it works fine, I have a 30 gallon boil kettle and I have to cover half just to save from losing so much in evaporation

McAvinbrew · Mar 7, 2016

Thanks for the advice guys. I guess I just wasnt expecting to lose so much in the new pot, but next time I will start out expecting to lose the same. Lesson learned

What I did today was exactly a suggested and added some extra water/DME to bring up the volume and keep the OG the same.

What I have noticed is that after about 5 hours in the Primary there still seems to be a lot of trub (about 3-5") at the bottom. The new Kettle has a mesh filter over the drain on the bottom but it seems it only blocked the really big stuff. Im hoping it settles down enough so when I transfer into the secondary next weekend I wont have too much coming with it.

Any pointers are welcome. Im a rookie here so eager to hear your ideas.

Thanks