Help me diagnose my low efficiency on this brew

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jvcjbl

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Brewed a belgian dark strong ale yesterday. Had the same LHBS crush the grains that ALWAYS crushes my grains. Mashed at 155'f. Follow Bobby_M's mash technique I split the remaining steps into two addition batches. (2.5 gal + 2.5 gal) which got me to my intended initial boil volume. I hit my 155'f first batch sparge spot on (like I always) do. I mashed for 60 mins and then drained and added the first of the remaining two addition batches. According the Bobby_M and BeerSmith I added 180'f water to the grains, stirred the bejesus out of it and let it rest for 15 mins. Repeated this and took a pre boil gravity. BeerSmith was calculating a 1.056 pre boil. I achieved a 1.051. After a 60 minute boil I should have had a OG of ~1.077 (factoring a 70% efficiency). Now I normally hover around 74% efficiency so I was planning on a ~1.078 OG. Instead a got a pre boil of 1.065. I posted a question about sparging temps and questioned why brew target always instructed me to essentially do a mash out by raising the grain be to 178-180'f. Bobby_M and others talk about just adding 180'f water to the grains and going about things that way. Can someone chime in and tell me where I went wrong, or should I go back to finishing up by raising the grain bed to 180'f like I used to?
 
That's expecting quite a lot of evaporation to gain 21 points during the boil. Do you normally gain that much? I get about 1 point per 10 minutes or 6 points during a 60 minute boil. Efficency is mostly about what is going on in the mash, not the boil kettle.
 
it is belgian so are you sure you didnt forget to add sugar to the boil or few days after pitching, that wold also explain huge SG difference between prebiol and OG
 
HAHAHAHAHAH I re-read the instructions and I totally forgot to add 1lb of table sugar.
 
:) you can still add it, some people say its even better to add sugar 2-3 days after pitching yeast, also you can make inverted sugar and mak it lighter/darker to modify color/carmel notes
 
Not sure how it's gonna work. This is the first time I've brewed basically totally sober and I screw up. Haha. What would be the recommended method for adding 1lb of sugar into the fermenter when it is already at desired volume? I'm assuming boil on stove with "x" amount of water and chill and add to fermenter?
 
last time i did it i heated 2lbs of table sugar with minimal amount of water and tbs of lemon juice to 280F over medium-low (this supposed to invert sucrose in to fructose and glucose molecules) then take it of the stove and slowly added more water till i was happy with density of the syrup (be careful when adding water), cooled it down to 75 or so and added to fermenting wort, worked very well
 
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