I noticed this yesterday. Of the few AG batches I've done, they were all 1.25 qts/lb or less. Oct 18 I got 72% eff. @ 1.23 qts/lb and yesterday, Oct 25, I got 79% eff. @ 1.5 qts/lb.
I had never 'seen' a dough ball before yesterday's brew (yes, there were alot and I broke them up ), so I'm guessing that I probably just plain missed them when I was using a thicker mash.
I'm planning to get a pump and basically have the same set up as you except I'll be using a keggle for the BK (for 10 gal batches). Thanks for all the info.
Sweet, nice to know I'm not the only one who had that experience.
I have a 15 gal kettle for 10 gallon batches, I bought a weldless fitting kit for it too but I'm thinking of putting a Blingmann 20 on my Xmas wishlist instead.
LOL, I had read where you mentioned PVC before and was thinking you had a PVC pipe manifold type thing, so I was curious to see how you implemented it. I may not go to the trouble of an actual PVC pipe manifold since your tubing version works so well!
<snip> Dumped all 8.25 gal of water into the kettle, added my salts per the water adjustment spreadsheet assuming 8.25 gal of mash volume, and loaded up 11# of grain into my mash tun. Goal is to have 7 gal pre-boil, assuming .125 gal per # of absorption. BeerSmith says with that much water to heat to 162*F so I heated to 161*F while setting up, measuring, and crushing grain. Once I hit my strike temp I pumped all the water into the cooler and then started recirculating. <snip>
You say you dumped all the water to the MLT, but I'm guessing not all since you are recirculating to the BK and you say later that you balance the in/outflows so the BK doesn't drain too quickly. Or do you mean you dump it all to the MLT for dough-in, then let some drain back to the BK so you can start recirculating?
How much liquid is in the BK during recirc? 2 gallons? more? less? does it matter as long as there is some in there?
I read an article in this months BYO where a guy had a counter top AG system similar to this. It got me thinking about this approach.
In the same article the guy mentioned that doing the no-sparge method seemed to greatly improve the quality of his brews. So I have been looking at pumps and think I might go this route.
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Oh that's awesome, that article was great! So you really think that the quality of your brews made a jump after switching to this process?
No sparge? For me, ABSOLUTELY. It's obvious to point out though that a LOT of great beers get made with traditional batch and fly sparges. I've just found a process that works incredibly well for me and reformulating my recipes to expect 70% efficiency instead of 80% meant only a few cents more in grain.
), so I'm guessing that I probably just plain missed them when I was using a thicker mash.
here are the pics.
Linear Mode
