litttle eff. batch sparge help please

OK recipe is
Yooper brews DFH IPA 60 min

Up until this point I have been hitting bad eff. at 55. to 60%. I have a new Barley crusher set at 1:00..nice crush. I set my eff. at 65% so I upped the grain to 15 pds of 2 row and 8oz of MO. I figured with the new setup I would hit higher eff. estimated OG of 1.075 at 65% eff. I hit 1.073 into fermenter.

Mash 4.75 gal at 155(wanted more malt flavor) held 155 for 60 min. mixed nicely every 15 min, mash out with boiling water 1 gal. Temp went to 158. Vorlaf 1 gal until clear and drain. PH fine

Sparge water I split into two and sparged with 2.5 gallons twice..brought temp to mash to 170 and held nice..kept at 170(mixed held for 10 min) vorlaf and drain..repeat

OK first runnnings 1.082 second 1.055 third 1.015. seemed good except first was a bit low. I boiled for 30 mintues to get water to 7 gal and then recipe as usual.

Ended up with 5 gal in carboy at 1.073.

ideas?? I didn't mash out as high becasue of room but the sparge brought to 170.

help would be great I hit the recipe dead on but wanted to upp my eff. more with the new crusher.

Jay

I always look at water volume first when troubleshooting efficiency.
First off, with 15 1/2 pounds of grain. your water volume of 3.75 gallons makes for a pretty thick mash. I would use no less that 1 quiart per pound of grain. This would give you almost 4 gallons for the mash. This would be a minimum.

If I'm reading correctly, you used 6 gallons to sparge (1 gallon for mash out and two 2 1/2 gallon batch sparges). This is also low for good efficiency. The books I've read recommend 1/2 gallon of water per pound of grain. This is a lot of water and makes your pre boil volume way too high unless you don't mind 2 or 2 1/2 hour boils or longer. I think when making high gravity beers you have to sacrifice a bit of efficiency and use more grains or you need to end up with more pre biol volume and boil longer.

The first runnings look a bit low, but the second and third runnings look good. If you used a bit more sparge water, you could make a very slight improvement in efficiency, but as Rich said, you would need a longer boil..

The low gravity of the first runnings, point to a problem in the mash. The most likely causes of this are crush, pH, or possibly water chemistry.

I don't know what the 1.0 setting on the Barley Crusher is (I don't have a BC), but if you'd like to send 10 lbs crushed Maris Otter or the BC I'll be happy to check it out for you.

You say the pH was fine, so I'll ignore that.

What about the water chemistry? My water has very low calcium levels, and I add gypsum and chalk to boost the calcium without screwing up the pH. When I ran out of gypsum a few months ago, my efficiency suffered as a result.

One other possibility is that the mash was not thoroughly mixed, leaving pockets of dry grain.

Hope this helps.

-a.

I would recommend using 1.25 quarts per pound of grain for your mash. This would have you mashing in with 5 gallons for this recipe. At 3.75, like Rich stated, that is a very thick mash and is most likely the cause for your poor efficiency. If your mash is too thick you are not going to get optimum conversion, conversely having too much water can cause the same problem.

Sounds like your SG is fine though and your beer won't suffer any from your poor efficiency.

Cheers!

I almost always use 1.25 quarts per pound for the mash. Even so, it sounds like you hit the og just fine!

Less than a quart per pound is way too thick a mash. Since you were able to add a gallon at mashout, I think you would have been much better off using that gallon of capacity in the mash. You don't need to mashout in batch sparging, just drain and add the first sparge hot enough to hit 170F.

My batches typically run 50% of the sugar from first runnings, 33% first sparge, 16% second sparge. The first runnings should be about double the gravity of the second, but a lower volume.

Sorry Correction in was at 4.75 gallon for the mash..my bad I was typing fast. this is 1.25 per pound. I agree about the mash out. But I wanted to use more water in the sparge. My water is Chicago I also used some bottle water so the water is good. The PH was good, and I mixed very good every 10 to 15 minutes. Could using a few gallons less affect my eff. by that much?? would that be more of a water volume problem and less of a mash problem?

Jay

Since your last running was 1.015, you might try crushing a little finer. Not much danger of a stuck mash with that recipe and batch sparging.

Thanks for the insight. Do most of you have lower eff. with 15 plus pds? How much do you tend to lose? I think the main thing I could have done to up my eff. would have been to mash out with more water. I would have just had to boil for longer. As for the crush, and my final runnings, I actually made a finer crush than the barley crushers factory settings so I don't think that hurt me much. I think the beer will be very close to yoopers recipe as I hit very close to OG, I did go for a bit more body and malt as I read some people wanted to do. Even if I didn't mash out with as much water, if you sparge and hit 170 doesn't that make up for it?

Also in match sparging I tend to vorlauf slow but once I am clear I run it some what quicker as I read it has less affect than other mash methods. All in all I think if I would have hit 75% than this would not be DFH 60, but even still I have some fine tunning in my technique for sure.

Jay

Another way to get more body in the beer is to do a thicker mash. With your initial typo, you had very nearly 1 qt per lb, which is what I use. If you don't believe me, check what Ray Daniels, Terry Foster, or Charlie Papazian recommend for a Pale Ale. Going for 1.25 qts per lb produces a much thinner tasting beer, as well as cutting down on the sparge water.

-a.

I have heard that as well. I think my biggest problem is figuring how much sparge water I want to use without boiling for days and days with a big beer. I am planing a RIS stout next so I will have to plan this better and just be willing to boil for over 2 hrs to get what I want. I get a lot of mixed opinions on water volume and it seems as you get up in grains you need to up the water even more.

Jay

My experience to date with batch sparging is that your efficiency drops the bigger the beer you make unless you increase your volumes and then boil longer. In my system this means going from about 60% with a 1.065 beer to 80+% with a 1.035 beer. So on bigger beers I use more sparging water and start with 8g of wort and boil an extra 60min. Even so my efficiency remains lower on the bigger beers. One way to get around this is to use a parti gyle process. I specifically purchased a refractometer in order to start doing this in the future.

GT