I'm not a virgin anymore!

[Homegrown Hops]

"Better beer does not equal more beer".

I usually aim for more of the better beer, and generally like to have 10.5 gallons of 1.070+ beer.

HH

[rich]

Thanks for the awesome input peoples. I went back into promash with my actual fermenter volume. I have my primaries marked at .25 gal intervals so this was easy to gleen. 5.4 gallons would put my eff at 78%. Promash is great but now I want to see some of the formulas involved. Also, I should have phrased my last question better. How can I have hit my targeted eff, and be off by .009 gravity points? I need hard numbers, it's in my nature. Maybe the answer is in this thread, and I'm too horse blinded to see it.

As a less important point, I don't shoot for volume either. Hell, in this batch I just hoped for enough sugar for beer. What I got was what I got. In truth it came out better than I expected. The numbers I recorded weren't so much to gauge this attempt, as they were for future reference, and the simple need to take excrutiating notes on everything.

You guys rule (almost to the point of a drunken "I love you man"). I did a bunch of research, but now I'm begining to ask myself (and you freaks) questions I could not have concieved before the fact.

[Lars]

A bit late, but congrats on your 1st AG. I'm a batch sparger too and I usually get 75% efficiency into the fermenter. Thats how I calc my recpies, and I have occasionally been known to overshoot my target gravity.

[zymurgest]

"Better beer does not equal more beer". Hit those target numbers.

Right on, and the only way to do that (IMHO) is with a properly calibrated sight glass. All my brew friends tell me how they are always off on their target volumes (and therefore OG's) and wanted to know how I do it consistently. The secret is in knowing *two* things -- first, your original volume; second, what your evaporation rate is. The first one is easy, just look at what your calibrated sight glass shows (in my case 13.5 gallons). Second thing is you need to know how much volume evaporates per hour, or your percentage evaporation rate (in my case it's 1.75 gallons per hour or 13% evaporation rate). Knowing these two things allows for you to correct, either with added water (preferably) or added heat (hopefully not to exceed 15% evaporation rate, but that's a whole nudder story!), whichever is needed. I generally boil for 90~120 minutes so I have quite a bit of control over my final volume, and actively track my hop additions so I don't accidentally get more extraction than what I want from the hops (usually I get 30-33% KUR) so as to not throw off the balance of the wort. Hope this helps to clarify what I was trying to say in my previous posting. Ttyal, and ilbcnu!

Prost!

Michel