Low Efficiency - Troubleshooting w/ No Luck

Hi all,

I know there are multiple posts about this, and I've browsed FlyGuys recent post about this as well, but I'm still apparently missing something. I routinely am missing OG by 10-16 points.

Efficiency is in the low 60's%.

Was hoping I could list out my process and get some feedback about what I'm screwing up.

I'll use today's recipe as an example as it was par for the course...

Brewing a Dunkel, 10 lbs German Pils, 3/4 munich, 1/8 chocolate, 1/8 roast barley 350 and 2 oz of Perle Hops. According to calculator on tastybrew.com I should hit about 1.060.


I heated about 3.5 gallons of water to 168 degrees, to dough in, dropped all 11 lbs of grain in my cooler, gave everything a good stir, put a blanket on the cooler and waited 60 minutes. Temps were between 154 and 152 the whole hour.

After hour was up, I vorlauf (spelling? yeah, I have no idea...) the first few quarts back through and then run my grain bed down near empty, then add about 3.5 gallons of 170 degree water. I ran my mash out back through my grain bed a couple of times, based on some reading that this might help boost efficiency.

I collected just about 5 gallons even (grain absorbed a little more than I thought). So at this point, I cool off a sample of sweet wort and see that my gravity is at 1.044. (anyone have a faster way of cooling off a sample, hate this part).

So what's the deal here? Any suggestions?

Also, I see a lot of people pulling off a sample @ end of boil. Two questions about this: 1.) Does it matter? 2.) How do you correct for low efficiency post boil? I always do it pre-boil because that gives me the opportunity to throw in some dry malt to correct gravity.

Any tips or advice? It's not a big deal to correct for it with malt extract, I just would like to know what I'm doing wrong. Keep reading about efficiency in the 80's and would love to get there. I used to order everything from NorthernBrewer and recently switched to an LHBS locally, but my efficiency is still awful so assuming it's the "nut behind the wheel" so to speak as opposed to crush...

Post boil reading will be higher because of boil off. It will concentrate your wort. Try taking a reading then and see if that matches your predicted OG.

There's no deal at all. BeerSmith 2 gives me 1.045 pre-boil gravity assuming 75% efficiency which is what I get 95% of the time. This will come out to a 1.056 SG with a 1 gallon boil-off. Seems you're doing everything just right (except your beer color won't be to style with that recipe and it should really have a lot more Munich malt to follow style but that's nit-picking).

Investing $30 in BeerSmith will shed A LOT of light onto the brewing process. You'll never know the ABV and other key beer characteristics w/o SG and FG.

Spending another $30 on a refractometer will take the time to cool a sample down to about 5 min since it is such a small volume; keep the hydrometer for measuring FG though.

Thanks for the feedback. Still a little confused. I ran off just about 5 gallons exactly - because my efficiency (at least appeared to me to be low) I added about 1.36 lbs of light malt to boost. Once I finished the boil and cooled, I checked gravity and came out at about 1059. It seems like if I'd actually done everything correctly the malt addition would have messed me up and put me at about 1.075?

I do need a refractometer and beer smith, I'm sure that would help.

My example above is for collecting 6 gallons of runnings and boiling down to 5 gallons; I glanced over the fact that you collected 5 gallons and then boiled... I'm a BIAB guy myself and have never mashed in the traditional sense. The closest that I have come is doing the stovetop mashing method posted by DeathBrewer which was stickied. I now do full volume BIAB mashing and haven't looked back.

Based on what I have read about batch sparging, you should split your sparge water into two and stir up each one to get the sugars into solution. But, I even got better efficiency with a single dunk sparge (but did stir the grains during the dunk). How does the crush look? Just throwing things out there.

There are a few areas where everyone is usually able to improve efficiency. The first is grain crush. You should make sure there are no whole, unbroken husks or even just cracked. They need to be broken up. I've actually found that if you condition your grain (gently wet it with a spray bottle at least a few hours before milling), you can get a finer crush but leave whole empty husks.

Another thing I do is when I mash out, I add about a gallon of 200 F water first and stir to raise the grain bed temperature and start making the wort less viscous (as well as stop conversion). Let it sit for 5-10 minutes, then vorlauf and drain. Then add the rest of your sparge water, stir like crazy for a minute or 2, then vorlauf and drain. You want to take the gravity reading preboil to be able to calculate your mash efficiency. Take a sample and cover it and cool it down in the freezer. I always have a preboil volume of 7 gallons, so I mash/mash out with the appropriate amount to end up there. My efficiency is always 80-85%, though my first few batches were around 70% until I got my system down.

There are other considerations too, like water pH that are typically not an issue for most people. If you use tap water though, you may want to test for pH if the water report is too vague.

Try using more sparge water. I usually dump in about 1.5 gallons of hot (nearly boiling) water and stir before I crack the valve to drain the first runnings. Then pour in about another 3.5 gallons, stir like crazy, let it sit 10 to 15 minutes, then drain again until you hit your pre-boil volume.

Adding all the grain at once could be a problem because you might have a dough ball. Try adding a bit at a time and stirring.

Don't bother cooling your sample - just take the temp of it when you measure the gravity and then use one of the online temp / gravity calculators to get the real value (or beer smith).

Also, stir more. Check crush, double check your thermometers. Drain all the way when doing batch sparging.

Finally, I would suggest targeting 7 gallons of runoff into your boil kettle. Ignoring the benefits of the full volume boil, the more water you put through your grain, the more sugar you'll get. For those of us with efficiency problems (I've fought this gremlin before), don't worry about tannin extraction from over-sparging.

This has all been very helpful. Sounds like there are two pretty big changes here - the first being that I'm probably not running enough water through my grain (gonna need a bigger brew pot), so I'll try upping that to 7 gallons. Also like the notion of raising the temp of the grain bed, vorlaufing and then mashing. Makes sense this would get things moving. So let me also ask - there was no mention about time in the above. Usually I stir up my grain bed after adding water, then let it sit for an hour. But I've also read that some people don't worry much about time. They just stir it up, start performing vorlauf with the first few quarts and then start collecting sweet wort. Curious about thoughts one way or the other on this? I thought that conversion took more time than this, but I've seen that notion challenged. Thanks for the input so far, this has been enormously helpful.

Break that sparge up into 2 sparges.

1st one 2.25-2.5G 180-85 degree water. This will get you to 170.
2nd 2.25-2.5G 170 degree water
The more you sparge the more sugar you will rinse out.

If pot size is an immediate concern, you can always put a gallon into another pot and throw it on the stove for a side boil. When you have the space in brew pot after some boil off, toss it in.

Your time question kind of confuses me but Ill give it a shot. I use a 5 gallon cooler for mash tun. For an example I would have a grain bill of 10 lbs.

Heat strike water to 175ish and drop into cooler, put lid on. 1.25 qt per pound of grain. Example = 3 Gal
After about 15 minutes the cooler has absorbed all the heat it wants. Check temp and adjust to about 12-15 over mash temp.
Stir in grains. Make sure no dough balls and stir the piss out of it. Check temp. May take a few minutes to settle down. Stir and adjust.
Wait 1 hour. Dont mess with lower mash times until you have some brews under your belt. Heck it wouldn't hurt to do a 90 min.
Stir it up and Drain into boil pot. I dont vorlauf, I just run it through some panty hose. Saves me time. Example would yield 2 Gal.
Stir in 180-185 degree sparge water to raise temp as close to 170. Example would be 2.5 Gal. STIR it!
Immediately drain into pot. Total in brew pot would now be 4.5 gal.
Stir in 170 degree sparge water, another 2.5 Gal. Important to STIR it! Adjust this amount to get your boil volume.
Immediately drain. Total in brew pot would be 7 Gals.

I would recommend an 8 Gal kettle for 5 gallon batches. I use fermcap so no worries about boil over. Full raging boil. Boil off 1.5 gals and lose .5 in my system. I use the above method and consistently over shoot my northern brewer kit OG. I overshoot it bad by at least 10 points most times. One side of me loves it but the other side hates it because I am jacking up the style/recipe. I recently bought beersmith mainly because of the fact I was over shooting my OG's and have outgrown using prepackaged kits.

If you use the above method and still dont get a legit efficiency, I would check your water or possibly buy a mill and crush your own grains. I use water from a local spring, mill my own grains, and buy exclusively from NB so I can vouch for their grain.

This is what I used until I stepped up to a keggle.

http://www.walmart.com/ip/IMUSA-Tamale-and-Seafood-32-Quart-Steamer/13370045

I think meat803's post gives some good suggestions.
Breaking up the sparge into two sparges will probably give you slightly better efficiency. Doing a single sparge on the other hand will save you some time.
If you only collected 5 gallons pre boil, you would probably end up with about 3.5 - 4 gallons post boil. Assuming you are making a 5 gallon batch, you probably need to collect about 6.5 gallons of runnings.
Adding sparge water hotter than 170 will help to raise the grain bed temperature up to the desired 170. If you add 170 degree sparge water, the temperature of the grain bed will not get anywhere near 170, and sugars are more easily dissolved at higher temperatures.
If you do two batch sparges, the second batch could also be hotter than 170 (but not as hot as the first batch).
The most important thing that he said was to stir the sparge water after adding it. It is this stirring that dissolves the sugars in a batch sparge, and in your OP you did not mention stirring except when doughing in.

Hope this helps.

-a.

I always stir my mash every 20 minutes. I don't know if it does anything except to lose some heat. Its a routine that I go through. Read on the board that peoples eff. goes up.

I think you need to make sure your crush is good first thing,that more than almost anything else will really limit your efficiency if it is off. Do you crush your own malt or have a HB store do it? If the latter ask them to double crush it. If the former what are your gap settings at and how does your crush look? If this ends up being fine then yes it is that you are not using enough water, but your first runnings should be 60% of the sugar content, so it doesn't impact efficiency as much as crush.

meat803 said:

Break that sparge up into 2 sparges.

1st one 2.25-2.5G 180-85 degree water. This will get you to 170.
2nd 2.25-2.5G 170 degree water
The more you sparge the more sugar you will rinse out.

If pot size is an immediate concern, you can always put a gallon into another pot and throw it on the stove for a side boil. When you have the space in brew pot after some boil off, toss it in.

Your time question kind of confuses me but Ill give it a shot. I use a 5 gallon cooler for mash tun. For an example I would have a grain bill of 10 lbs.

Heat strike water to 175ish and drop into cooler, put lid on. 1.25 qt per pound of grain. Example = 3 Gal
After about 15 minutes the cooler has absorbed all the heat it wants. Check temp and adjust to about 12-15 over mash temp.
Stir in grains. Make sure no dough balls and stir the piss out of it. Check temp. May take a few minutes to settle down. Stir and adjust.
Wait 1 hour. Dont mess with lower mash times until you have some brews under your belt. Heck it wouldn't hurt to do a 90 min.
Stir it up and Drain into boil pot. I dont vorlauf, I just run it through some panty hose. Saves me time. Example would yield 2 Gal.
Stir in 180-185 degree sparge water to raise temp as close to 170. Example would be 2.5 Gal. STIR it!
Immediately drain into pot. Total in brew pot would now be 4.5 gal.
Stir in 170 degree sparge water, another 2.5 Gal. Important to STIR it! Adjust this amount to get your boil volume.
Immediately drain. Total in brew pot would be 7 Gals.

Click to expand...

Some great tips in here. Thanks for the feedback. Next time I'll follow this method. Seems like I don't stir enough (I never stir before mash out based on some other reading that the grain bed should settle thoroughly settle before rinsing), and I'm not gathering enough sweet wort. So next time I'll also run off 7 gallons and add to boil as it boils off.
I'll post results.
I've used NB and my LHBS recipes with similar results, so for now I'm going to alter method rather than attributing to crush.