I'm gonna make an educated guess and say well into the 90s. Probably 95+. I believe most do continuous sparging with some variance including hybrid techniques.
do they get a tanker truck full of LME?I'd say 90% +/-. Which, actually, is feasible for homebrewers too.
And not all Breweries fly sparge, heck, not ALL breweries are All-Grain.
I was just looking at the HuppMann Lauterstar and from the design it looks like all of the runoff collects through the runoff pipes into a round sort of tub before flowing out. Does this mean the wort will have a lot of exposure to the air?
I also was thinking about this when I was reading about the cooling cones some breweries use to cool the wort after a boil - to me everything I am seeing appears to expose the wort to a lot of air.
95-98% is a good range for a large commercial brewery. Small micro breweries that use single infusion and lauter in the mash tun should get less. I'd expect around 90%.
This link shows info for the Huppmann Lauterstar, a high end lautertun. On page 6 there is a chart that shows the OBY (overall brewhouse yield) for a few "brands". They range from 93 - 98%. I have a textbook that shows that very little of unconverted starch and also very little sugars are left in the spent grain. This attests to excellent conversion and lauter efficiency.
Note that the big breweries get this high efficiency with only 5-7% boil-off. I.e. their preboil volume is only about 6% larger than their cast-out. Compare that to the 15-20% boil-off that many home brewers need for 90+ efficiency.
Kai
I don't know that many details about leeching processes but what do you think makes their equipment so much more efficient? I was thinking it might be volume but, that can't be it, as their grains are probably seeing less water than ours.
Do large breweries do a vorlauf like homebrewers do or is there another method for keeping the flour out of the boil? Is there some other method that lets them use a finer crush, as that seems to be a huge thing for efficiency?
They rake the grainbed even during sparging?
You don't really have to crush so fine that rice hulls are necessary. A longer mash can also help in getting to the 100% conversion efficiency that is required for good brewhouse efficiency.And I guess home brewers do the fine crushing to some sort with crushing the grains more and then adding in rice hulls to help with the sparge.
Yes. The raking is controlled by the flow rate and the turbidity that is measured during the run-off. When the flow starts to slow down the bed is raked and when the wort becomes more turbid, the raking is slowed and/or the rakes are raised (i.e. they don't cut as deep). The engineer on the last page of the huppmann brochure seems to be looking at a diagram of the turbidity, flow rate, extract and other parameters monitored during lautering. If you spend that much sophistication you are expected to to much better than homebrewers
You don't really have to crush so fine that rice hulls are necessary. A longer mash can also help in getting to the 100% conversion efficiency that is required for good brewhouse efficiency.
Kai
What are good sources of information on commercial brewing processes? Know any textbooks or other books on the topic?
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