Hey guys! I recently wrote a series of three articles about how to predict efficiency before you even brew. The idea was that most (if not all) of the softwares for brewing out there ask you to input an efficiency value to calculate the OG. You in turn use this to size the grain bill accordingly (ie more or less 2 row or base grain of choice to reach the gravity you want).
Issue I have with this is that a lot of people (myself included) don't know what to enter as a value. As you brew a couple of beers you can use the many great tutorials online to calculate efficiency after the fact. If that value is constant you can start using it as your efficiency. But that assumes you keep brewing similar gravity beers. If the grain bill becomes huge (like in a barleywine) or small (like an English bitter), your usual efficiency value won't yield the right OG values in real life.
So I made a bunch of tables to account for this.
This shows how efficiency changes depending on the OG of your beer. So a normal beer [1.050,1.060[ gives a brewhouse efficiency of 72% while a doppelbock [1.070,1.080[ gives 64%. But wait say you brewed 5 batches in the [1.050,1.060[ range and got an efficiency of 85% instead (let's say you fly sparge). When you will want to brew that doppelbock you need to use a correction factor for the value I gave you in the table to account for your higher efficiency. So 85%-72%=13% will be the correction factor and you should enter 64%+13%=77% as an efficiency value when making a doppelbock.
These values were derived for a "typical" batch sparging, but with a correction factor should be useful for mostly any one who does all-grain brewing. The above table assumed a 60 minutes boil. I have made a second table (below) for 90 minutes boil.
If you are interested in learning how I came up with these numbers you can read my articles (warning; lots of math involved)
article 1
article 2
article 3
Note that using the tables is an approximate way to account for changes in efficiency. The best is to model your system and write your own brewing spreadsheet (as shown in the articles). However the tables should get you in the right ballpark on your first try so that's still a good thing.
Issue I have with this is that a lot of people (myself included) don't know what to enter as a value. As you brew a couple of beers you can use the many great tutorials online to calculate efficiency after the fact. If that value is constant you can start using it as your efficiency. But that assumes you keep brewing similar gravity beers. If the grain bill becomes huge (like in a barleywine) or small (like an English bitter), your usual efficiency value won't yield the right OG values in real life.
So I made a bunch of tables to account for this.
This shows how efficiency changes depending on the OG of your beer. So a normal beer [1.050,1.060[ gives a brewhouse efficiency of 72% while a doppelbock [1.070,1.080[ gives 64%. But wait say you brewed 5 batches in the [1.050,1.060[ range and got an efficiency of 85% instead (let's say you fly sparge). When you will want to brew that doppelbock you need to use a correction factor for the value I gave you in the table to account for your higher efficiency. So 85%-72%=13% will be the correction factor and you should enter 64%+13%=77% as an efficiency value when making a doppelbock.
These values were derived for a "typical" batch sparging, but with a correction factor should be useful for mostly any one who does all-grain brewing. The above table assumed a 60 minutes boil. I have made a second table (below) for 90 minutes boil.
If you are interested in learning how I came up with these numbers you can read my articles (warning; lots of math involved)
article 1
article 2
article 3
Note that using the tables is an approximate way to account for changes in efficiency. The best is to model your system and write your own brewing spreadsheet (as shown in the articles). However the tables should get you in the right ballpark on your first try so that's still a good thing.
