AG66 - Struise Pannepot Clone Attempt

I'm currently preparing this for brewday tomorrow, finally after wanting to brew this for ages. Thanks to those who helped me tweak the recipe, I'll remember you all when this is done (but only if it's good)

Belgian Dark Strong Ale

Recipe Specs
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Batch Size (L): 18
Total Grain (kg): 8.0
Total Hops (g): 40
Expected OG: 1.097
Measured OG: 1.086
Expected FG: 1.016
Alcohol by Volume (ABV): 9.2 %
Colour (SRM): 43
Bitterness (IBU): 27
Brewhouse Efficiency (%): 68
Boil Time (Minutes): 75

Grain Bill
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5.80 kg Pilsner (72.5%)
700 g Maris Otter Malt (9%)
250 g Special-B (3%)
50 g Cafe Malt (0.5%)

Added at mash-out:
150 g Carafa Special II (2%)
100 g Chocolate (1%)

Added during boil:
700 g Candi Syrup, Dark (9%)
250 g Honey (3%)

Hop Bill
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15 g Magnum (15.3% AA) @ 60 Minutes (Boil)
25 g Saaz (3.6% AA) @ 30 Minutes (Boil)

Misc Bill
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5 g Orange Peel @ 2 Minutes (Boil)
3 g Coriander Seed @ 2 Minutes (Boil)
1 Vanilla Pod @ 2 Minutes (Boil)
1 g Cinnamon @ 2 Minutes (Boil)
1 g Nutmeg @ 2 Minutes (Boil)
1 g Thyme @ 2 Minutes (Boil)

5 g Oak Chips for 7 Days (Secondary)

Notes
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Mash in at 45° for 10 mins
62° for 30 mins
68° for 30 mins
77° for 15 mins

Fermented with Wyeast 3522 - Belgian Ardennes
Pitch at 20c and ramp up to 24 over 4 days
After 7 days ramp down to 17c and hold until FG reached
Drop to 5c and hold for 4 weeks before bottling

Water Profile
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Calcium - 90 ppm
Sulphate - 60 ppm
Chloride - 120 ppm
Alkalinity - 30 ppm

Instructions for making the candi syrup
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I already posted this in the other recipe help thread, but it makes more sense to put it here:

Equipment shot, sanitiser, non-stick pot, wooden spoon, cream of tartar to aid inversion, thermometer to avoid burning...


Turns out I didn't have as much white sugar as I thought, so I added a little demerara to make it up to 700g.


I added just enough water to dissolve the sugar plus a pinch of cream of tartar, then brought the temperature to around 130°c and held it there.


These blobs were taken 30 mins apart to show the colour change.


And this was the finished product after 3 hours or so.


I then added 500ml of water to stop it solidifying and poured it into a 5L bottle to keep till brew day.


It has a lovely deep red colour and it smells fantastic, so I'm pleased with how it turned out. Should add some nice flavours to the brew.

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Had a slight issue with the starter; everything was going well, it was visibly fermenting within only a few hours but the following morning I found it like this. As you can see the foil cap was popped off and it could have been sitting like this for hours. Fingers crossed for no infection, but I'll have a little taste of the starter before I pitch tomorrow and if there's any doubt I'll have to go to plan B, which is to use either the Wyeast 3711 or Voss Kveik which I have in the fridge.

 

Good luck.

Can't see any contamination being able to battle it's way through that krausen.

 

Collecting the RO water which I blend 50:50 with my tap water:

I've been using this cheap ebay RO unit for a couple of years now and for about 25 brews and the TDS is still single figures

 

Weighing out the spices. The combination smells amazing.

 

Mine is a 4 stage filter, sediment, activated carbon, RO membrane and resin (which is the brown thing). The resin should in theory bring the TDS to 0 but for brewing that isn't really necessary.

 

Had an early start this morning and got the mash on about 7, the pH is a tad high but close enough.

 

Never had pannepot before but it sounds amazing, hopefully find one in Brussels later in the month.

 

You'll find it in abundance in Brussels, check out the Reserva as well, it's the barrel aged version.

 

Okay I need help with this, I've been trying to figure out what went wrong but I really have no clue.

Everything went swimmingly until I took the OG measurement... and it was 20 points low. 20 f**king points. How is that even possible? That's an efficiency of 52%!

At first I thought my hydrometer was faulty but I confirmed it with the refractometer. Then I thought maybe I'd missed a bag of malt and forgotten to add it to the mash but nope. So I can't figure it out.

I mashed for almost 90 mins, stirred twice during the mash, the pH was fine, the sparge was nice and slow, all my volumes were correct so what the hell happened
I managed to hit a gravity of 1.090 with no sugar addition when I made my eisbock and I didn't do anything differently here. Very odd.

 

Strange one. Was it all mixed in? No dough balls?

 

Yeah I spent a good 5 mins stirring it after dough-in, plus a couple of stirs during the mash.

 

Bummer. Is it a new sack of grain, or has the same grain yielded good efficiencies in previous batches?
EDIT: If it is a new sack of grain, you can always do a small thin test mash to confirm the culprit.

 

I don't buy in bulk so it was two 3kg bags of crushed malt maybe about 8 weeks old. Don't have any left to test it

 

OK, well, I'd test the thermometer then, because if that's working fine then the grain is the only remaining option, be it old, too coarsely crushed, badly modified, or just all husk and little starch. I wonder if we will get more cases like this. The barley growers have been complaining about the weather a lot this year, bad yield and possibly bad grain.

 

It seems a bit of a cop out to blame the malt, but as you say it's the only remaining option. I didn't notice anything obvious about the grain crush, but then I wasn't really looking out for it. I had considered the possibility that maybe one of the bags of base malt was uncrushed, but I hope I would have spotted that. That being said I've had about 6 hours sleep in the last 3 days and was barely awake this morning when doughing-in I'll check the temperature probe on the GF tomorrow against my calibrated Comark to make sure its reading okay.

 

Was it crushed

 

It probably isn't too late to do an iodine test. If that comes up positive then you know for sure it's the grain that hasn't converted properly.

 

Weird. I know what you mean about not wanting to blame the malt, but it really sounds like the malt! Do you take any gravity readings other than OG? I take a pre boil gravity reading so I have an idea as to whether I’m on track or not, and I can add some extract if I feel like I need to.

 

OK so a new day and a new perspective. Whether I did something stupid or it was a bad malt crush (or both) who knows, but the brew is what it is and it's fermenting away happily right now and smells great. I might chuck in a bag of DME if I can be bothered later to bring the ABV up a bit but I won't worry too much.

@Ajhutch I used to always take a pre-boil gravity reading but I stopped a few batches ago because I was consistently getting around 100% conversion efficiency. I'll definitely start doing that again.

After a bit of googling, pretty much everything I found re. low Grainfather efficiency mentioned the grain crush. I've been holding off buying a grain mill for various reasons but this has maybe pushed me in that direction...