I suppose efficiency has been beat to death already

But, I'm stumped as to exactly what it is (efficiency) and why so many find it so important. Forgive the newbness

For what it's worth, I just brewed my 4th solo all grain today ( been all-grain brewing under the mentorship if my neighbor since August, just started brewing on-my-own since mid April )

Basically, I use a very, very simple hefe style recipe.

4.5lbs of American wheat
4.5lbs of 2 row
0.5lbs of carapils ( for body and head retention? )

Besides the yeast and hops, I'll mention that I batch sparge. First step calls for 3.1 gallons of water. Batch sparge calls for 4.5 gallons of water. Total of 7.6 gallons of water, I'll get about 6-6.25 gallons to boil, which I do for 1 hour.

I lose about 1 1/2 gallons of water to grain absorption. My gravity should be about 1.050 and I usually hit that by the time I pitch the yeast. Todays preboil sg was 1.040, after the hour long boil, it finished at about 1.050 per the hydrometer and the refractometer.

Is efficiency a measure of how much wort you yield as a percentage of the quantity of starting water? Or, is it a combo of water AND the sg of your batch at start of fermentation?

Again, sorry for the newbness... but, on the positive side, I've bottled 2 great batches of my first all grain. 3rd one goes to bottles tomorrow, 4th batch will begin fermenting any minute (it's only been in the primary for about 9 hours )

Efficiency refers to the extraction of the starches/sugars from your grains.
Example: if I managed to retrieve half the total sugars from my grains that would be 50% efficiency. Simply put, if you have poor efficiency you have less fermentables than your recipe called for and the beer essentially ends up watery unless you use extra grain/add malt extract.

No worries about newbness, I spent half the day at work today re-reading Papizan's Complete Joy to home brewing, he's got a handfull of chapters at the end which get into the nitty gritty of how the molecular chemistry/biology of beer works if your curious.

As for why carapils gives head retention, your not using it for the fermentable sugars, your using it for the proteins and also I believe it has a high proportion of dextin (an unfermentable sugar) both of which change the chemistry inside your beer giving it different properties.

I'd like not to confuse the E word more than it already is. But when people talk about it sure would be better if they explained which efficiency they are talking about.

The word "Efficiency" is misleading IMHO. There is not just one type of efficiency when it comes to homebrewing.

There is mash efficiency - As in how well did the grain bill convert?

There is a lauter efficiency - How much of the sugar available was successfully drained into the boil kettle?

I think what most people are talking about when they talk efficiency is a combination of the two, plus the physical losses. How much trub left in the boil kettle, boil volume, boil off, amount of beer going into the fermenter and loss to fermenter trub.

All these combined is an efficiency of some sort and I believe it is called Brewhouse efficiency. But when reading somebody elses recipe.. who knows what they are talking about when they use the term efficiency?

P pwn?

Dan said:

P pwn?

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Are you summoning me Dan? That's funny. Must have worked!

A pound of grain has a certain amount of sugars in it that are considered recoverable. If you can get all of those into your wort, you've gotten 100% efficiency, regardless of how much water you added.

Like Dan said, there are 2 parts to get those sugars out of the grain. The first is in the mash. If you are not an all-grain brewer, skip this. The grains are full of starches, which are large-molecule sugars that are not water soluble. That means that if you don't mash properly, at proper temps, those sugars will not become soluble and will not become part of the wort that contributes to your OG - and your efficiency will likewise suffer.

Then, after you perform the perfect mash, you need to get the sugars out of the sponge-like grain bed. Even after several sparges, you will still leave some sugars in there, and thus never get 100% efficiency.

The calculations? Not hard, but I won't do that unless you want me to. Each grain has a potential specific gravity (which is the SG if 1 pound is mashed in 1 gallon water). But the thing to know here is that the efficiency has nothing to do with the amount of water you use.

passedpawn said:

Are you summoning me Dan?

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Yep, sure am Pappy. I always do when I have a question or need an experienced re-affirming answer to my comments, cause I know you're advice is sound.

I've been talking to a new brewer at my neighbor's house tonight and tasted his beer. It was an extract and tasted pretty darn good. He has the brew bug.

Man, I wish that instead of all of us spread out across the country we could be homebrewing together in each other's backyard.

Passedpawn and Stauffbier! Lets brew!

Thanks to all who've shared their knowledge

It makes sense now....

Begs another related question..... yes, I brew all grain and I often wonder if I can cut down just a tad on my sparge water (batch sparge for me ) and literally squeeze down on my grain bed after the sweet wort has naturally drained out?

My method of filtering is a piece of stainless steel washing machine hose that has been gutted and fitted to some plumbing to exit my coleman cooler. It's about 15" long and no bigger around than a dime, with a coiled copper reinforcement to keep it from collapsing. Never had a stuck sparge with this set up.

The reason for asking if I can "mash" down on the grain bed is to force the suspended wort down to the bottom and out through my filter.

What got me thinking is I've been watching my teenage son's baseball team groom the field after a game. A couple of the kids use a heavy iron device that has a wide flat bottom and they pack down the area directly in front of the pitcher's rubber mound.

Why can't I find something like a big(ish) plastic cutting board and squish out the remaining wort? The way my coleman is designed, it has a small, depressed trough that is at THE VERY BOTTOM of my cooler. No leftover wort except for what is still soaked into the grain.

Thanks again for helping out the newb... I promise I'm reading papazian's book and just recently found Palmer's book online :rockin:

I just started brewing all-grain myself, but I believe the reason why you don't want to do that is it releases a lot of excess tannins from the grain husks that otherwise would remain there. This will change the flavor of your beer in a negative way.

I don't have any experience with this, but the same is true for grapes, and many other things that are 'grown' where the skin has some undesirable things in it.

fastenova said:

I just started brewing all-grain myself, but I believe the reason why you don't want to do that is it releases a lot of excess tannins from the grain husks that otherwise would remain there. This will change the flavor of your beer in a negative way.

I don't have any experience with this, but the same is true for grapes, and many other things that are 'grown' where the skin has some undesirable things in it.

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This is a common misconception. Tannins do not come from squeezing. There was a guy on here a couple months back who had run his grain through a fruit press to get every last drop - no astrigency.

Tannin extraction is a function of high temps and bad PH. They are released via chemical reaction - you cannot add enough pressure to the grain to force the chemical bonds to break.