Crazy Brewhouse Efficiency numbers

I just finished brewing, and I plugged in my numbers for brewhouse efficiency and I got back a number of 111%. Is this even possible?

I have had consistent brewhouse numbers except for the first two batches and I have double checked my calculations the same way I have done for the previous batches and I still come up with the same number.

Thanks in advance

What numbers are you inputting? Something's wrong...

The more information you can provide, the better.

I had a similar problem to this a while back. It turned out that promash was having problems with the addition of an adjunct sugar. Maybe your software is having a problem along similar lines.

jacksonvillebrew said:

I just finished brewing, and I plugged in my numbers for brewhouse efficiency and I got back a number of 111%. Is this even possible?

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I had a similar problem with one of my beers in Beersmith. No matter how many times I started over and entered the data correctly, it insisted I had something like 97% efficiency, when the actual figure was more like 63%. I have no idea what was causing the calculation error (I had no oddball ingredients) but I've since switched to Beer Tools Pro.

What app are you using?

The brewhouse efficincy in BeerSmith can be a bit tricky, but there is nothing wrong with it, I have used it for about 20 batches now with no problem.

No, you can only get %100, unless there is a magical sugar fairy dusting maltose into your brewpot while you sparge. But you really wouldn't want to either because you would likely have to boil for several hours to get to your proper volume, and you would extract a lot of undesirable tannins.

how would you extract undesirable tannins from boiling too long?

DeathBrewer said:

how would you extract undesirable tannins from boiling too long?

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You wouldn't, but you would from sparging till you got %100 percent of the sugar out of the grain.

BarleyWater said:

The brewhouse efficincy in BeerSmith can be a bit tricky, but there is nothing wrong with it, I have used it for about 20 batches now with no problem.

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Well, there was something wrong with it on that one batch.

Seriously. I entered, re-entered, re-re-entered again...and it choked on that one recipe every time. (I had 3 other brew sessions in there that calculated just fine.) All I can figure is that there was some combination/amount of ingredients that triggered some sort of odd calculation bug. Like I said, it was fine with my other ones. And it probably would have been fine with 100 more. But it refused to properly calculate my Old Legburn Imperial Stout.

That's not why I quit using it, btw.

BarleyWater said:

You wouldn't, but you would from sparging till you got %100 percent of the sugar out of the grain.

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ahh, that makes sense

i don't think it's possible to get 100% anyway.

Theoretically, you could get greater than 100% efficiency, you just have to be better than the lab at getting the sugar out of the grain.

i thought 100% was the potential, i.e. the maximum amount of sugars available in the grain. am i wrong?

The more I think about it and the more I rework the numbers, I have a feeling that the LHBS forgot 2 lbs of base grain. When I take two pounds off the base grain, Beersmith's OG number is very close to the one i read from my hydrometer. Does that sound correct?

DeathBrewer said:

i thought 100% was the potential, i.e. the maximum amount of sugars available in the grain. am i wrong?

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The Extract Course Grind % and Extract Fine Grind % numbers are based on laboratory mashes, with either a course grind (similar to that which we do at home) or a fine grind (basically powderizing the malt, from what I understand).

Brewhouse efficiencies are typically calculated based off of the course grind numbers, so no, it is not really the maximum amount of sugars in the grain.

An excellent article about this is:

BMG - Understanding Malt Analysis Sheets -- How to Become Fluent in Malt Analysis Interpretation

thanks for the info!

ChrisKennedy said:

The Extract Course Grind % and Extract Fine Grind % numbers are based on laboratory mashes, with either a course grind (similar to that which we do at home) or a fine grind (basically powderizing the malt, from what I understand).

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I think it was John Palmer, on an earlier episode of Basic Brewing on mash efficiency, who discussed this.