Negative effects of high efficiency?

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bacchusmj

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Maybe this is a dumb question, but Ill fire away: Is there any possible downside to getting super high efficiency?

Reason: I just finished mashing an IPA, got my 7 gallons of boil volume and checked my gravity. Was shooting for 1.045 and got 1.058. Not huge but puts my overall efficiency around 87%.

TIA.
 
Unless u are entering a competition nope, might take away from the mouth feel an May add slight alcohol taste but besides entering a comp And spending a couple dollars extra nothing negative I know of... Yay strong beer


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Higher abv if more fermentable sugars released...


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I over shot my eff. By around .014 and that's what the judges in the competition said... It ended up about 8 to 9 % abv


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Higher abv if more fermentable sugars released...

So in other words, you could get the same effect by just using more grain. Which kind of invalidates the argument that a higher efficiency by itself leads to higher alcohol taste.

Of course, this is all under the assumption that when you brew a recipe on equipment that gets 88% efficiency, you are smart enough to realize that brewing a recipe developed on equipment that gets 70% efficiency without scaling the grain bill down to match is going to throw the OG way off.

To answer OP's question, one of the problems with getting really high efficiency is tannin extraction from over-sparging. If you brew a smaller beer with an OG of 1.040, you're going to have use a pretty small grain bill. You still need to hit your target boil volume, so you end up running so much sparge water through the grain bed that you risk creating an astringent beer, which isn't a desirable trait.

To avoid that, you'll have to keep an eye on the gravity of the runnings and stop sparging when the runnings are 1.010 or a little higher. I would rather stop short of that and top off the kettle with the rest of the sparge water than risk actually hitting 1.010.
 
I over shot my eff. By around .014 and that's what the judges in the competition said... It ended up about 8 to 9 % abv

This where a tool like BeerSmith comes in handy.

When I brew a recipe, I enter it in Beersmith and using my known efficiency, I will scale the grain bill down until the OG matches the recipe. That way the beer comes out just like it was intended.

If you skip this step and just copy the recipe blindly, your OG may vary quite a bit from the target. You could end up with a beer that's too malty or too bitter. The alcohol taste you can't avoid with higher ABV beers unless you're willing to let them condition for some time.
 
It was my first 5 gallon batch, I stepped up from 1 gallon to 5 so my effiency has changed


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