Post boil SG HELP!!!

[Half-baked]

Hi William,

First thing is, don’t worry too much, a pacific ale with an OG of 1.044 is fine. You won’t taste a few points difference.

Can you just confirm your volumes? That’s 29l pre-boil (immediately before/just as it starts to boil?) and 23l into the fermenter, what was the post-boil value?

If there’s no measurement error, then your post-boil volume would be 28.3l, i.e. a boil off of 0.7l over 70 min!

So it would be fairly safe to say there is some form of measurement error.

First, are you comfortable your volume markings are correct? Get out a measuring tape, and punch in the radius and height into an online calculator to confirm.

Second, maybe try to find some YouTube videos of best practice for taking gravity readings. There’s actually a surprising amount that can go wrong, and it took me quite a while to get to the point I was confident (enough) with my readings.

There are good points above about wort stratification, temperature, calibration and settling out the trub/break material. All of these need to be spot on for the gravity reading to be correct…

 

[Will2233]

Hi Half-baked,
29L ish pre boil, 25 L post boil and 23 L into the fermenter.
I measured and used an on line calculator and the Robb brew markings are are fairly close, over the 30 L it was .28 of a liter out.
That would be cold measurement's, I suppose hot wort would be more.
I do give my wort a good stir after sparging before taking a sample.
William

 

[MHB]

I have found their malts tasty enough, but inconsistent in their brewing performance. Other small brewers have told me the same thing.

You should be able to get a look at the COA (certificate of analysis) a good COA will tell you the sieve results (size of the corns) as a percentage, the yield potential, from there you should be able to get the right amount of malt, crack it the right way and hit your numbers.
If your HBS is blaming the malt size, tell them to adjust their mill to suit the product they sell! Or adjust your own mill if you are cracking your own.
If you crack malt you should be able to grab a hand-full and sort through it. What is technically called hand evaluation, you should find few uncracked grains, lots of large husk fragments, plenty of kibble and little flour. If that isn’t what you are seeing look at your mill settings.
Some malts benefit from being double cracked, first pass to hit the bigger corns, second the average sized ones and to get a nice even crack without too much in the way of fines.

Of the easily available Australian base malts, I think you would be hard pressed to do better than Barrette Burston, I haven’t used much of the new Coopers malts so can’t really comment on them. Personally I usually spend the bit extra and go with UK or German malts, it’s going to depend on what you are looking to brew, those just suit my taste.
Mark