Not to hijack your thread here, but I have a stout question too. (Topic has been split. Kindest regards...Your friendly moderator )

I recently brewed a stout with an extract/partial mash kit I got from my home-brew store.

The recipe used:

6 lbs LME syrup
3 lbs Munich malt extract
1 lb crystal malt
1 lb roasted barley
1 lb Chocolate Malt
1.5 oz Perle Hops
1 oz Palisades hops

I slightly modified the recipe by adding an additional: 1/2 lb of the chocolate malt, 1/2 oz of Rainier hops at the end of the boil, and a 90g 86% chocolate bar kinda fell in there too.

My question is that my gravity reading when it was all done and the wort had cooled only read about 1.055; whereas, the info sheet that came to me with the kit told me the gravity should be 1.077. Also, another weird thing, is that somehow instead of the 5 gallons that I was expecting, I ended up with closer to 7 total gallons. ABV should be around 7.3% One thing that did happen was that my grain bag kinda melted open during the first part, and released a lot of the loose grain into wort that I later mostly filtered out, but I don't think that would have had any real effects.

What might have happened here? Am I screwed? Any way to fix this? It's been a week now, and it does look to be healthily fermenting away with fervor. Should I be this worried, or might it turn out fine?

Any thoughts appreciated.

Thanks a lot for the very thorough reply. I will invest in some new and improved grain bags before my next boil.

I think my volume problem was due to sparging. I used a few liters of fresh clean water to sparge the grains, but maybe I should have just re-circulated some of the wort from the pot through it a few times instead. Also my stove is a bit weak as I didn't have a "rolling boil" throughout much of the time; rather, it was more of an intense simmer with some bubbling and convection.

Once this batch finishes, I'll bottle it, try it, and post here how it is. Will be more careful next time. Thanks for the advice.

Just an update here. I transfered my stout into secondary in two three gallon glass carboys. I decided to add 900g of dark brown sugar to bring the alcohol levels up to near where they should have been. I know the brown sugar will of course impart its own flavor, and adjunkts are usually discurouged, but i'm still expermenting here as i always do. Plus, I tasted it while i was racking to secondary, and it tasted amazing! The chocolate bar that I threw in was definitly perceptible and noticable, but hardly too strong at all. It was exactally that nice subtle whisp of chocolate flavor I was hoping for!

For now, it's still happily frementing away in secondary.

Sounds positive! I'm results-oriented. If the result is delicious, I don't care how I got there! You should be good-to-go.

One side note, when sparging the grain, you want to use "clean" water to rinse those sugars out of the grain. The water should be around 170f. Much cooler and it won't keep the sugars liquid enough to rinse; much hotter and you'll extract tannins. You could push about 5 degrees either way and be OK.

I just popped open the first experimental bottle of my Chocolate Stout and the results are extremely favorable! I got adequate carbonation, wonderful aroma, and great taste! I can tell that it's still a bit imature, but i bet it will probably mellow a lot with age. I sealed all the bottles with wax, so there hopefully should be no problem keeping them around for a year or more if I can manage to hide them away from myself for that long! I got three cases of 12 22oz bottles each. I'm gonna take one to a party this weekend, one case i'll chill and have ready to drink, and I think the third case i'll hide away in a dark corrner of my garage.

I've done some experiments with fermented dark brown sugar in order to better understand its effects on flavour when combined with malts. The results suggested that it requires a bit more maturation time than pure malt, and so I only use it (and in small amounts) in beer styles that age well. Your stout might have tasted a little raw or immature when you tried it because of the brown sugar adjunct, and will take a little longer than usual to reach its optimum flavour. Well that would be my guess anyway.

Sounds like everything turned out just fine! Glad to hear it. Brewing can be funny that way. Just when you start to think that things maybe went bad, you end up with great beer.