Efficiency or should I say Inefficiency...

ilikeguns said:

thats good, fill up your mash tun with water and let it drain in the same way you would with a mash.. then measure the water that is left. My 10 gallon igloo holds on to about a half gallon.

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I did this too in Beersmith but lately I just tilt my cooler to get it all out. No sense in wasting half a gallon just because it is at the bottom. Now I leave Beersmith at 0 for lauter tun dead space.

Calibrated your thermometer?

I did a BIAB during the full moon - mashed for 90 minutes and got 1.024. @&$!

I traced it back to the grain being packed too tightly. Net net, make sure you're agitating your wort sufficiently to get the sugars out.

Hey Guys, Just wanted to give you an update. I did an IPA last night and took into account all of your recommendations and hit 70% efficiency!
What I did was:
Had my LHBS tighten the mill
Stirred the mash a lot more
Measure the strike and sparge water much more carefully
and sparged with water that was a little hotter than 170

With all of that, I hit 70%! That is a huge jump from the 59-60 I saw just last weekend.

Thanks again everyone!

awesome man. Thanks to this thread, I learned that I need to stir my mash more than I have been if I want a bump in efficiency.

Congratulations! It's a good feeling when you start predictably hitting your numbers. 70% is great, and many (most?) recipes assume that value for brewhouse efficiency.

Brew a few more recipes without changing your equipment or process to make sure you're consistent from batch to batch. Then if you want to observe the effect of any one parameter down the road, you can just change one thing at a time to get a feel for how that affects your system.

Congrats again!

jaylakejr said:

Hey Guys, Just wanted to give you an update. I did an IPA last night and took into account all of your recommendations and hit 70% efficiency!
What I did was:
Had my LHBS tighten the mill
Stirred the mash a lot more
Measure the strike and sparge water much more carefully
and sparged with water that was a little hotter than 170

With all of that, I hit 70%! That is a huge jump from the 59-60 I saw just last weekend.

Thanks again everyone!

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Cool! I'd say as long as you're hitting mid sixties or higher consistently, no need to mess with it.

ilikeguns said:

awesome man. Thanks to this thread, I learned that I need to stir my mash more than I have been if I want a bump in efficiency.

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Hey, not sure if you have a mash paddle but I got mine from this guy on eBay and it is super nice and the price was great. Search for seller predfam he is out of nj.

jaylakejr said:

Hey, not sure if you have a mash paddle but I got mine from this guy on eBay and it is super nice and the price was great. Search for seller predfam he is out of nj.

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I heard that too

jaylakejr said:

I wonder if my sparge water temp is too low... I think Saturday I will be brewing again and I want to get all my ducks in a row to try and up my efficiency. I am having my LHBS double mill my grains.

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I really doubt that your sparge temp has anything to do with it unless you're already not getting full conversion in the mash. You should read this and check....http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.ph..._Efficiency#Determining_Conversion_Efficiency . It will help determine if your problem is in the mash or sparge. I can tell that you 90+% of the time that efficiency problems are directly related to poor crush.

ilikeguns said:

Have you considered that your issue may be too much water?:cross:

I'm suspect of his mash calculator because I ran his recipe through BeerSmith and got way different strike and sparge volumes. I'm not saying that crush isn't a contributing factor, but too much water = low OG.

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Not if his final volume is correct.

Denny said:

Not if his final volume is correct.

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true

Denny said:

I really doubt that your sparge temp has anything to do with it unless you're already not getting full conversion in the mash. You should read this and check....http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.ph..._Efficiency#Determining_Conversion_Efficiency . It will help determine if your problem is in the mash or sparge. I can tell that you 90+% of the time that efficiency problems are directly related to poor crush.

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My efficiency never seemed to get out of the sixties when I was having my LHBS crush....since I got a mill I'm usually mid seventies. Although as a side note occasionally I do, no sparge batches, with efficiency in the mid fifties to sixties. However, these beers seem to taste fantastic, with more body and mouthfeel. Just an observation. So maybe sometimes we get too tied up with trying to push our efficiency to the limit....