Crazy High Efeciency - I think my LHBS Shop's Scale is off

I've been brewing all grain for about a year and a half now. The #'s for today's batch were startling. Either I got 97% efficiency, or my local shop gave me 8 extra lbs of grain. I'm thinking that it may be more like 7 extra lbs and their grinder is a bit on the tight side, as it to quite a while to drain the mash & sparge.

Eight pounds is a lot of grain, unless you are doing a 10 gallon batch of a big beer, you should have noticed it was heavy. I look at the bag for a RIS and compare that to a simple beer with 10 to 12 pounds of grain and I can tell the difference from across the room.

8 pounds of extra grain??? That would almost double most of my recipes!

I suspect either you have gotten rotten efficiency on your previous batches as a comparative or you made a miscalculation somewhere.

IMO 97% is near impossible!

Bet it will be good!

My #s are definitely accurate. I checked them with bot a hydrometer and refractometer. It was a 12 gallon batch (22.5lb grain bill) so I am figuring it had to be additional grain. The bag is marked with my exact order. I am just trying to figure out what the extra is.

Not gonna help you now, but this is why I always weigh out my own grains, even if it's just weighing the one pound bag from the supplier before I pour it in.

As they say, "Trust no one."

zeg said:

Not gonna help you now, but this is why I always weigh out my own grains, even if it's just weighing the one pound bag from the supplier before I pour it in.

As they say, "Trust no one."

Click to expand...

Lesson learned. I primarily buy bulk grain and grid it myself. Today's batch was a Vienna lager. I don't use Vienna often enough to justify keeping it in bulk, so u just emailed my order.

Did you calculate numbers by software? Might want to check the numbers it has for the malt. For example, I know Hopville's Beer Calculus has generic Golden Promise at 32ppg, when I've always seen it higher than that.

You can ballpark the initial weight if you still have the mashed grain. Assuming grain soaks up about 1.25 quarts/lbs, and one gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds...

Your mash would have been extremely thick if you didn't compensate for the extra grain. Just the mash volume alone should have raised questions.

Zymurgist05 said:

Your mash would have been extremely thick if you didn't compensate for the extra grain. Just the mash volume alone should have raised questions.

Click to expand...

It did seem a bit thick, however being that I am batch sparging with realitively thin ratio to start with, this can be tough to tell.

I went back through all of my #'s this morning, and it is coming in to be exactly 6 lbs high on the base malt.

I am going to investigate how they pull their orders. At the shop I use, the grain is all stored upstairs, and they just go pull it for you. I'm not sure if they measure all at once or several lbs at a time. My personal scale maxes out at 6 lbs, so I am wondering if theirs is similar. Another possibility, they may have used a different container on their scale prior to pulling my order and it been zero'd at -6lbs without them realizing it.

The other factor that is leading me toward extra grain is that my initial mash temp came in low by 3 degrees. I haven't had more than a 1/2 degree variance in a long time. The additional grain would explain this.