CNYBrew.com: Brew Day- Oktoberfest

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Brew Day- Oktoberfest

This afternoon I brewed my Oktoberfest and took some pictures of the process. The first shot is while I am heating up the sparge water and waiting for the mashtun to get done doing what it does. I Batch Sparged on this batch because I was feeling lazy. I mashed at 158f, mashed out at 160f and sparged at 170f for about 15-20min. I mashed for 60 min and mashed out for 10. This was off on some of my marks, but close enough!




The second shot here is from the boiling. I made all of my hop additions on the right time and used my grain screen for the hopps. However, there was a little bit of an issue with it this time because it seemed to hold water. This made me a little concerned because if water was not getting in, hops may not have been getting out.

My pre-boil OG was 1.042 qnd my final OG was 1.050. This is way low for my target, but I am not blaiming Beer Smith (yet) because I gave myself a 70% brewhouse effeciency (why I do not know) which would explain coming that short on my gravity reading.


I maintained a heavy boil for 90min and yeilded just shy of 5 gallons. I boiled off only .08 G though. I am not sure what that means.







This is my brewing assistant for the day Meatball. As you can see he is doing what all good homebrew helpers do, check out the neighbors.






After a long brew day, there is only one thing left to do...

Cheers!

2 comments:

Ted Danyluk said...

With the mash temp on the high side and the gravity so low I wonder how this one will turn out. Maybe the high conversion temp will aid in the flavor and body after the yeast chews through everything.

Also, did you adjust the hops to stay close to the same BU:GU of the recipe's .46? I guess then that would be around 19-20 IBUs. Anyways...just curious. Sometimes when my gravity is pretty far off, I'll quickly recalculate the hops to compensate...during the "hot break" period. A little long on the boil won't hurt anything. Then agai, I guess a little DME could also help in the very end too. Don't mind me too much.

Travis said...

Ted,

I have not made adjustments to my hop additions in the past to compensate for a low OG. That's a good observation though and I think I am going to have to start on that.

I have been thinking about the low OG and I realized that the fact that I batch sparged my have contributed to my low efficiency. No big deal though, I am not too far off from the style and I made my efficiency adjustments in Beer Smith.

Thanks for the input.

Cheers