High Krausen Dry Hop Possible Error

[kiblerjd]

Good evening. After my last batch I noticed my final beer volume was off quite a bit more than it normally was. Upon research I saw that the number for hop absorption loss was likely where the culprit was because it was way to high. After playing around with the recipe a bit I found that when you select dry hop high krausen, for some reason it thinks you are adding those to the boil and therefore counts them against you in the absorption losses. This isn't supposed to happen correct?

 

[Sunfire96]

Any time that hops touch the wort/beer, they're going to absorb some liquid. Whether in the kettle or in the fermenter, you will lose that amount of liquid from your final packaged volume

 

[kiblerjd]

Yes i obviously understand that. I don't think you understood the point of my OP or i likely wasn't clear enough. When i create a new brew session based on a recipe i develop, that brew session gives me expected (calculated) water volumes based on the recipe and my equipment profile. I have these numbers very accurately measured for my system and because of that, when i go into the "water requirements" tab in my brew session it tells me everything i need to know.

So if the program incorrectly thinks high krausen hops are being added to the boil, it exaggerates the hop absorption losses making them way too high. That then throws off all numbers in the water requirements tab. If you are shooting for a 5.5 gallon batch, and it thinks your hop absorption losses are .25 gallons higher than they really are, it is going to tell you to add an additional .25 gallons of sparge water. So at the end of the boil you will be left with .25 extra gallons of beer, and therefore you OG will be way off.

I hope that explains it better. The water requirements section in the brew session has nothing to do with fermenter volumes nor should it.

 

[Craigerrr]

What I do when I have big dry hop additions is to increase batch size by scaling the recipe to compensate for the absorption. This way you end up with more wort with the expected gravity in the fermenter. Essentially I account for it up front.
There is the absorption factor, but there is also a variable in how much wort gets left behind if the hops have not compacted very much.
I would rather leave some beer behind that fight with clogged ball lock posts!
Not sure if this answers your question, or if it helps, but I thought I would share what I do.
Cheers!

 

[Craigerrr]

I should note that the recipe editor accounts for hops absorption, but will not adjust required fermenter volume to account for hops absorption there. Could it, should it, maybe, but it doesn't.

 

[kiblerjd]

Thanks craigerrr. I guess the point of this post was to make the folks doing the programming side of things on brewers friend aware of a potential error. For the specific content in the OP, i don't think high krausen dry hops should be affecting the hop absorption numbers for my boil. There is obviously something weird going on therein the programming.

I have my system dialed in at this point and i knew for this batch that with the huge amount of dry hopping i was doing in the fermenter, that 5.5 gal going into the fermenter on brew day would give me exactly 5 gallons at the end. Because of the error with the program I'm going to now end up with more than i can fit in the keg which just wastes beer, lowers my efficiency, and lowers my alcohol content. The next logical feedback i'm going to get is to just "boil longer" but with my hop schedule in the boil it would have totally changed the profile of the beer (i.e. that 10 minute add would have become a 30 minute add etc). The program has literally never failed me until this incident with the water requirement numbers.

For anyone else that reads this i'm not looking for help or advice on this specific topic... i just wanted to get the program fixed. I really do appreciate people taking the time to respond however and i don't want this to come across the wrong way. I love this community of folks. Cheers

 

[Pricelessbrewing]

Thanks for the report @kiblerjd,

I'm adding this to an existing update that is looking to improve the QWR, and volume calculations.

I would expect the calculations for dry hop, and dry hop high krausen to be identical. Since the volume losses for these correspond to a loss during fermentation, they should not affect the brew day volumes or QWR as the target volumes are all set via the target batch size as being into the fermentor (or at the end of the boil if you have target = kettle for some reason).

Here's an example QWR with a large hop addition in the BOIL

And the same recipe for dry hop:

And the same for dry hop high krausen.

 

[kiblerjd]

Awesome thanks! Thank you for confirming i wasn't going crazy haha.