extractions efficiency

I've got a question on efficiency. I recently made my first attempt at a barley wine(my fifth batch of all grain). I used 21 lbs of grain, and got 7 gals of wort. I then boiled until I had 4.5 gals. My OG was 1.085. From what I've read this seems a little low. Any ideas on how to extract more sugars next time?

I should note that I did two 5.5 lb mashes and then added the two worts together for the boil. I also recuirculated the wort several times through the grains.

does your system usually get good efficiency? did you batch sparge? dont know much about efficiency... i just got my mash/lauter tun built about a month ago, but that does seem low for 21 lb.s of grain. what kind of system are you using?

If you did two 5.5 lb mashes, wouldn't this equal 11 lbs, and not 21 or did I misunderstand you?

A gravity of 1.085 from 11 lbs grain sounds more reasonable.

-a.

ajf said:

If you did two 5.5 lb mashes, wouldn't this equal 11 lbs, and not 21 or did I misunderstand you?

A gravity of 1.085 from 11 lbs grain sounds more reasonable.

-a.

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Thanks for the sanity check there, ajf. If in fact it was 11 lbs of grain, I'd agree that an OG of 1.086 is pretty reasonable.

That was my mistake, it was two 11.5 lb batches.

I just put together a cooler mash/lauter tun system. This was my first try with it. I mashed at ~152 F for 60 min and then sparged with 170 F to obtain a final volume of 3.5 gallons. I also ran the wort back through the spent grains after the sparge each time.

sdent said:

That was my mistake, it was two 11.5 lb batches.

I just put together a cooler mash/lauter tun system. This was my first try with it. I mashed at ~152 F for 60 min and then sparged with 170 F to obtain a final volume of 3.5 gallons. I also ran the wort back through the spent grains after the sparge each time.

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When you say you ran the wort back through, do you mean your entire volume of collected wort back through the grains?

I think you just left a lot of the sugars behind. It would take a lot of boiling, but next time go for 5 gallons from each batch. Or do like I do for very heavy ales, cheat! I shoot for 50-60% of my sugar from grain and use extract to bring the gravity up.

How much water do you use with the mash?
How do you crack/mill the grain?
What grain do you use?
How did you determine the mash temperature?
How much sparge water did you use?
What malt did you use?
Can you explain your mash and sparge procedure in excruciating detail?

My last two brews both used 9 lbs grain (8 lb Maris Otter + 1 lb crystal), mashed in 2 and a bit gals of water, at 154 - 152 degrees. They were sparged with 4 - 4.5 gals water at 175 degrees, and yielded an OG of 1.058 - 1.06.
This is approximately 2.5 times what you are getting.
I would expect my extraction to be a bit more efficient than yours, because I am using less grain and lower gravities, but not by a factor of 2.5

-a.

I would have to agree that you just left your missing gravity points in the mash tun. Only collecting 3.5 gallons from a 10.5 lb mash would not be a thorough sparge. When I have a mash that size I will collect about 5 gallons of wort, top off my kettle with water to 7.25 and have a 6 gallon post boil in the 1.050's.

When I brew, I rate my efficiency based on what comes out of my mashtun, not was comes out of the kettle. This tells me more accurately how efficiently I extracted sugars from the grain. Once it's in the kettle, you can evaporate more or less water, and depending on how much hops you put in the recipe, you'll retain more or less wort. In the end, your gravity and volume can vary greatly, but this is recipe-related, not process related, in my humble opinion. So all you need to do is acurately measure your kettle volume before boiling, give it a good mix for an even solution, take a wort sample, let it cool to room temp and measure the density. Take the decimal places (ie if 1.055, take 55) multiply by the number of gallons and divide by the number of lbs of grain. This will give you your true efficiency.

I agree that based on your numbers (85pts * 4.5gallons / 21 lbs = 18.2 pts/lb/gal) is quite low. Typicaly, you should be getting at least 26-28 pts/lb/gal (ie 1.026 - 1.028) from your grain, which is about 75% efficiency. But you can go as high as 90-95% if your crush is optimum, pH is in the right range and spage SLOWLY.

Seb

sdent said:

I've got a question on efficiency. I recently made my first attempt at a barley wine(my fifth batch of all grain). I used 21 lbs of grain, and got 7 gals of wort. I then boiled until I had 4.5 gals. My OG was 1.085. From what I've read this seems a little low. Any ideas on how to extract more sugars next time?

I should note that I did two 5.5 lb mashes and then added the two worts together for the boil. I also recuirculated the wort several times through the grains.

Click to expand...