Adjustment for Low Efficiency

My efficiency drops when using a large grain bill. How do you adjust your grain bill to make up for the lower efficiency so that you achieve your intended OG. I am doing an AG Celebration Clone that calls for a total grain bill of 13-15 lbs and an OG of around 1.065-1.069.

tbone said:

My efficiency drops when using a large grain bill. How do you adjust your grain bill to make up for the lower efficiency so that you achieve your intended OG. I am doing an AG Celebration Clone that calls for a total grain bill of 13-15 lbs and an OG of around 1.065-1.069.

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I use brewing software (Beersmith) and I change the expected efficiency down a bit. I then adjust the grain bill upward to get my desired OG.

Thats how I do it... I get about 80%. For my Double RyePA, I dropped my efficiency down to about 65%.

In general though I think you'd want to adjust only the base malt to get your og up to where you want it with the lower efficiency and leave the quantity specialty grains more or less alone.

The easiest way that I've found is to get your recipe into some brewing software then bump the efficiency down to where you think it will be. Then add back some base grain until your OG is back to where you want it.

You can use any brewing software that allows for effeciency adjustments. If you don't have software already, try out the one in my sig. It's my new project and would do what you need (for free I might add.)

I normally adjust for my low eff (65%) with software as well, but the last beer I brewed ended up at 1.050 instead of 1.043. Apparently I was brewing better that day than normal, because that OG meant my efficiency jumped 10%!

How do you calculate your efficiency?