Mash Efficiency Less than 60%

Summary
Using 14 Lbs of Grains 11 Maris and the rest specialty malts mashing for 60 Minutes and fly sparging(7.5 Gallons) for 40 minutes in a 10 gallon cylindrical cooler with a false bottom I get a gravity reading after a 90 minute boil with 5.5 Gallons remaining of 1.055. Promash says that I'm 58% Efficient. I took a gravity reading of the wort coming out of the cooler after I had sparged off 7.5 gallons and at 70 deg's it had a gravity of 1.026

Grains
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Grains were crushed well by the brew shop, and they have validated that the crush produces efficient mashes.

Water
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I have pretty much prefect water, similar to the profile of czech pilsen region, so I add 5.2 to my mash.

PH: I did not test the ph so I don't know.

Mash Process
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Strike water temp was 161 ish and my mash temp hit about 152 ish. I stirred at about 30 minutes in and sparged with 180 - 200 deg water. I know 200 is to hot(husk tannins) but I wanted to try and give the sugars the best possible rinse. The interesting thing is my mash temp never seemed to get about 150 during the sparge process.

Boiling, my boil is a slow simmer, I could increase and boil off more wort allowing me to sparge more wort in the first place getting a better effiency?

Gravity of the wort still coming out of the mash after pulling off 7.5 gallons was 1.026, this makes me think that I have good conversion, and the sugar is there, but It's not getting rinsed. Also If I had channeling, then those sugars would still be on the grains, and I wouldn't get such a high gravity reading of the wort at the end of the sparge.

Am I boiling to lightly and I just need to pull off more wort?
Getting frustrated because I don't want to base all my recipes for 55% eff and buy a bunch more grains.

Ryan

OG in the fermenter was 1.055

So I didn't take a gravity reading before I boiled, just when complete. I boiled for 90 minutes

More experienced folks than me will chime in I'm sure; how did your LHBS "validate" that their mill is set properly?

What was your target OG?

Do you stir a lot when sparging? That is where you get the "best possible rinse".

So I talk to the guys at the shop and they have extreamly efficient mashes doing there brewing at home, and they use the same mill, so I made the inference that if the crush was poor no one using the mill would be able to get an efficent mash.

We'll 100% effiecent mash would be 1.094, thats an unrealistic target obviously, but I'd like to get 75% and that would make my target 1.071

No I don't stir at all when sparging... thought that would mess the grain bed up? maybe the important part of the grain bed is the bottom 1/4 or so?

I just brewed my first AG yesterday and had similar results I was looking for an O.G. Of 1.070 and only hit 1.055. So I'm curious what when wrong as well. My efficiency was obviously very poor so I must of done something incorrectly

Would I be better off doing some sort of batch sparge? Or is fly sparging have the best potential for getting the best rinse/effency?

Mash too thick? What is your water/grain ratio?

Perhaps a longer mash? Verify conversion before sparging?

so I had 14 pounds of grains and used about 5 gallons of water

the gravity reading at the end makes me think I have good conversion and the sugars are there... it's just a rinse problem

That is a really high gravity for the end runnings. Probably a problem with the sparging ive had better luck with batch.

So with a batch would I just add a couple gallons hot water to my cooler, set the filter bed and then drain all the wort, then do it again?

What kind of effency do you get with batch spargine?

Drain all your wort out, add the sparge water, stir, recirculate, and drain it all again. Repeat until u get 6 gallons.

ackerman81 said:

So with a batch would I just add a couple gallons hot water to my cooler, set the filter bed and then drain all the wort, then do it again?

What kind of effency do you get with batch spargine?

Click to expand...

It depends on what kind of batch sparge. A single batch sparge I heard will get you around 60% - 65%. I did a fly sparge and got between 70% - 75%. I have heard some people on here say they do a double batch sparge and get around 80% +.

If I were doing that grain bill , I would mash with 4 gallons, 1 quart and 1 pint of water ( 4.375 gallons figuring 1.25 quarts per pound) ......then I would double batch sparge to my pre boil volume.... with my set up I would get a shade over 2.5 gallons of first runnings meaning that I will need 4 gallons of sparge water ( 6.5 gallon preboil on my outside set up). I split that in half and add it in and stir the crap out of it...let it set ten minutes and run it off ( vorlauf of course) ...add in the second half of my sparge water and stir the crap out of it again and let set ten minutes and drain. I am consistently over 75% using this method if my figures are correct....the only issue I have is with really big grain bills, my efficiency drops off.

You have the equipment to pull off an efficient fly sparge so don't abandon it just yet. If you really do have pilsen-like water with really low calcium, you might want to add gypsum or chalk to the mash to get it up over 30ppm. Everything I've read suggests its required for good conversion. I'm not saying you didn't fully convert, but checking the gravity of the first runnings would indicate that.

Do you establish a 2" thick bed of water above the grain before you start running off? For me it usually requires that I run the sparge in for a bit before I open the tun valve. It prevents channeling. How are you delivering the sparge water to the mash?

So I had the valve slightly open and ran off about 4 pitchers worth to set up the grain bed, then using the pitcher over a bucket lid to spread out the water I add until it was about an inch over the top of the grain, then I slowly added water as the sparge progressed at about 180-200 deg.

But I never "Mixed" the grain up after the mash was complete.

I was under the impression that the 5.2 would sufice for "Engergizing" my mash but I'll do a bit more research on the topic, seems though with the gravity being 1.026 on the end runnings after I sparged 7.5 gallons that I should be able to make the sparge good enough to get those sugars off before I've collected all the wort I need?

<Edit>*Note when I say run off, I really mean recirculate

I have a 10g cylindrical MLT with a false bottom, and last weekend I brewed a 6g batch with 13.75 lbs grain, ending up with an OG of 1.068 (86% efficiency) with a fly sparge.
We did things a little bit differently.
My strike water was 167F to reach a mash temperature of 150F. I used ~1 qt per lb to reach that. Sounds like you were using about 2 qt per lb, which would leave you with 3.5g less sparge water than I used.
After the mash, and before the sparge, I added 3.25g near boiling water to perform a mash out, stirred the mash really well, and let it sit for about 10 minutes before vorlaufing and starting the sparge. When I started doing a mash out (several years ago), I found my efficiency increased by about 10%.
We should have used about the same amount of sparge water after accounting for the mash out, but my sparge lasted slightly over 60 minutes vs your 40 minutes, and the gravity of the final runnings was 1.010. I had to add about 1/2g top up water to reach the required pre-boil volume.
I would suggest that you mash a bit thicker (say 1 to 1.5 qt water per lb grain) and do a mash-out with a good stir before starting the sparge.
Then you could slow down the sparge a bit, as fly sparging does take time to do effectively.

-a.

Man that sounds great, so it's sounding like my *problem* might just be the sum of a couple problems. Interesting that you add the 3.25 gallons of hot water to get the mash temperature up. throughout my sparge the mash temperature never got above 150 deg.

What was your pre and post boil volums? Wondering if you boil off more than me and also help out the effiency by sparging off more wort?

I usually brew rather lighter brews than I did last weekend, and my pre-boil volume (with about 10# grain is 7g. Last weekend, I made an IPA (hence the extra grains), which had over 1/2 lb whole hops in it. To account for the hop absorption, I increased the pre-boil volume to about 7.5g (possibly a bit more). I honestly don't know what my post-boil volume was, but after draining to the fermenter, I had collected 6g leaving a lot of wort trapped in the hops. That was when I measured the OG.
One other thing that may be worth mentioning is that numerous sources report that calcium is beneficial to enzyme activity during the mash. Your water is almost certainly low in calcium (as is mine), and adding some CaCl and/or CaSO4 to the mash could be beneficial. See https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f128/brewing-water-chemistry-primer-198460/ for some excellent advice.

-a.

Thanks, going to get some 2-row and run some efficiency tests using this new found information in my small batch system, it's the same in design but different in size but it has produced the same results historically, so I'll run a couple pounds through it to test before I do my next big batch of real beer. I'll post my results when I'm done. Thanks all for the great help.

Ryan

So I ran the two following efficiency tests in my small batch setup, I have a 2 gallon cylindrical MLT with a bucket lid turned false bottom. Not as good of a setup as my 10 gallon mlt, but I figured it would at least give me a reasonable comparison. Historically my small setup has immitated my big setup in efficiency, or inefficiency as the case may be.

So I took two, two pound bags of 2 row for two seperate tests, 1 a slow fly sparge and 2 a fast batch sparge.

Test 1)

Grains:
2 lbs 2-Row + 5.2 Mash Energizer

3 qt's of strike water @ 162 deg
Dumped this on the grains hiting about 151 deg ish, and let rest for 60 Min.

3 qt's of mash out water
After 60 minutes of mash I dumped on 3 quarts of 200 ish degree water, bringing the mash temp up to 165 degs.

180 degree water until I collected 5 quarts of wort.

at the end of the sparge the shape of the grains in the bottom of the MLT were kind of shaped like a toilet bowl, so I'm going to assume that there was a fair ammount of channeling going on. Also I collected 25% more wort than final amount that is needed and typically I collect 36% more wort than is needed to account for evaportation.

With that said my pre-boil gravity was 1.041 and my end runnings gravity was 1.022 which makes it arround 72% efficient, so my guess is that using my

Test 2)
Same as test one up til the sparge part, then instead of fly sparging, did a batch sparge twice to get 5.5 quarts (slightly different than test 1)

My final pre-boil gravity was 1.035, with an end runnings of 1.024, which puts the batch sparge at arround 65% efficient

So my tests seem to show to me that the BIG difference is hitting it with the 200 deg mash out water to bring the temp of the overall mash to 165 degrees.

I'm brewing a big batch this weekend using my 10 gallon mlt so I will use the same steps and see if I get a better efficiency and I'll post my results.