Poor efficiency on 4 straight batches

Hey all. I originally mentioned some of my problems in this thread but it was suggested that I give more details in the All Grain forum.

Anyhow, I built the rubbermaid 10 gallon MLT. I am using the same ss braid as almost everyone else is using. I have done 4 all grain batches using this, and I have gotten poor efficiency every time - anywhere from 55% to 65%.

All of the grain came from 3 separate local homebrew stores where they were crushed. I am kind of guessing that, if the crush was an issue - that 3 separate stores would not have this problem, but I suppose that could be the case. I plan to buy my own grain mill soon, so I can definitely tune that a bit.

I am also using spring water. My first 2 extract batches came out plasticky, and lo and behold, my local water supply (Philadelphia) uses chloramines. I've since switched to spring water - twice deer park, twice fox ledge (PA supplier). I definitely did not buy distilled water. I've added no extra minerals or salts or anything to change the pH. I don't have any pH testing stuff, so I don't know if that is an issue. Someone suggested trying "PH 5.2 Mash Stabilizer", which I also plan to use in the future.

Here are the details of the first two batches. I can post the other 2 if they are helpful. I am batch sparging here. I'm still getting drinkable beers, but the efficiency problem is definitely annoying, especially when I have to adjust the hop amount during brew day to account for the imbalance, which I am not so good at.

Batch 1: Belgian Pale Ale

11# Pilsener
.75# CaraMunich
.5# Light Munich

Mash at 152. Used 3.8 gallons 160 strike water. Added .4 gallons cold water (because I overshot 152 a little bit). Mashed for 1 hour. Drained. Sparged with 3 gallons 170 water. Drained. Got approximately 5.5 gallons of wort. Hydrometer reading was 1.030 at 135F, which gives me 1.044 (53%).

Batch 2: Chocolate Porter

11.5# 2-row pale
1.5# 2-row munich
1.5# crystal 40L
.5# black patent
.75# chocolate

Mash at 152. Used 4.9 gallons 168 strike water. Added .5 gall because it was a little too hot. Mashed for 1 hour. Drained. Sparged with 2 gallons. Got approximately 5.8 gallons of wort. Hydrometer reading was 1.036 at 136F, which gives me 1.051 (53%.)

Any thoughts/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I can post the other 2 results (hands are getting tired right now) - they were an IPA (55% eff) and a Pale Ale (62%) With both of them, I tried to be more even with the mash and sparging volumes (approximately 50/50) but that did not help too much.

your not using nearly enough sparge water.

Wait -- are those volumes pre-boil or post-boil? Your numbers seem OK for pre-boil (around the 70% mark).

And yes, regardless you seem to be using too little sparge water. What kind of boil-off are you getting?

I feel your pain as I have the same thing happen to me when I first went to all grain. I built my cooler with a CPVC manifold like Plamer showed in his book and I was stuck in the low 60's as far as my efficiency. I switched to fly sparging and now I get high 80's on my efficiency's plus bought a barley crusher and mill my own grain. These two things together I believe help me get where I wanted to be.

OK, I just did the math. In your first recipe, you collected 5.5 gals of wort pre-boil, right? For a 5 gallon batch, you would normally shoot for about 6.5 gals, so that when you boil down, you are left with 5 to 5.5 gals.

I also see that your gravity readings must have been pre-boil. At 70% efficiency, your pre-boil gravity at that volume should have been about 1.047. You said it was 1.044, which isn't that bad for store crushed grains.

As Brew-boy mentions, crushing your own grain should give you a real boost. Most homebrew shops crush fairly coarse for their customers, and probably aim to get them at about 70% efficiency (+ or - about 5%). You are in that range.

I doubt you will need to go out and get fly sparge equipment and change your technique if you want to increase your efficiency. Lots of us here get in the 80's consistently batch sparging, and a few are up in the 90's. Focus on your crush first, then your sparging technique next. Sparge volume seems to be something you could increase to easily get you up into the 70's for efficiency.

Also, based on my experience, I've found that hydrometer readings are unreliable above 120 despite temperature corrections charts. Even above 100 I don't always get accurate readings with corrections.

And also sparge hotter. If you're not doing a mashout, I wouldn't hesitate sparging with 180 - 185 degree water.

You need to sparge more, alot more... with that much grain you need to be pulling out 7-7.5 gallons pre boil, then boil for a good 90 minutes or so... your eff. will skyrocket! You are leaving ALOT of sugars in your MLT. I sparge until my gravity hits about 1.008, I also monitor the PH of my runnings. If you add a little CA to your sparge water, you can also increase the ammount of runoff you can collect before the PH drops too low.

Couple things...

1. Mash thickness. You seem to be shooting for 1.25 qts/lb but keep diluting based on missed temps. Make sure you're measuring the temp 5 minutes after doughing in. Let the grain thoroughly absorb the heat. If you keep having to dilute, infuse first to about 1.1 qts/lb to account for the additional water later. The more room you leave for sparging, the higher eff. (+2-3% efficiency)

2. Hotter sparge temps. Go with 180-185F as mentioned. (+5% efficiency)

3. Break sparge into two half size infusions. If you were going to sparge 5 gallons, do two 2.5 gallon infusions with a vorlauf and drain in between. (+5%)

4. Sparge more. For a 5.25 finished batch size, collect 6.5 preboil. However, I'm going to take a wild quess here that you have a 30qt turkey fryer pot and that's why you're stopping at 5.5 preboil? For shame, you'll always struggle with efficiency because that extra gallon of sparging will take a lot of sugar out of the grain (+5%).

5. Longer mash. Of course, crush counts but I'd start questioning only after trying what I wrote here. If your crush is questionable, an extra 20-30 minute mash will help correct for it a coarser crush.


Just doing some estimating on the possible efficiency increase for following each of those points can get you something like 18% more.

6.5 gallons preboil is great in my experience if you have a 8-10lb grain mash... but he is pushing 15 lbs!! 6.5 seems pretty small for that large of a grain bill, IMHO. I generally pull off nearly 7 gallons with a 10lb grain bill, taking the gravity down to 1.008 in the runnings and the PH to about 5.8 Using this method I have run off 7 gallons with a 10lb grain bill! My eff. is generally 77-78%.

As the other guys asked... when do you decide to stop collecting wort? How do you determine that? My guess is still that you are leaving alot of sugars in the grain.

Honestly for me, I don't worry about efficiency drops with large grainbills anymore. Yes, you can sparge more and boil a lot longer to get the volume down. But it doesn't save you much in the end. I just accept that I will lose some efficiency points on bigger brews, and add a bit more grain to compensate. In the long run, I save some time and lots of propane (which ain't cheap either).

So I think it just comes down to personal preference.

taste the mash after you collect your boil volume. if you're only running 3.5 gallons through it, i bet grain bed still tastes sweet.

FlyGuy said:

OK, I just did the math. In your first recipe, you collected 5.5 gals of wort pre-boil, right? For a 5 gallon batch, you would normally shoot for about 6.5 gals, so that when you boil down, you are left with 5 to 5.5 gals.

I also see that your gravity readings must have been pre-boil. At 70% efficiency, your pre-boil gravity at that volume should have been about 1.047. You said it was 1.044, which isn't that bad for store crushed grains.

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Yeah all of these volumes are preboil volumes. I know I screwed up the amount of preboil volume that I should have gotten for 5 gallon batches (did a poor job of calculating how much water would be lost to the grain.) I am confused as to how you are calculating 70% efficiency being 1.047 though? Correct me if I am wrong:

Max theoretical gravity pts = 11x38 + .75x35 + .5x32 = 460 pts (using palmer's malt yields in ppg)

70% of 460 = 322 pts
322 / 5.5 = 58.5 => 1.059 gravity

I doubt you will need to go out and get fly sparge equipment and change your technique if you want to increase your efficiency. Lots of us here get in the 80's consistently batch sparging, and a few are up in the 90's. Focus on your crush first, then your sparging technique next. Sparge volume seems to be something you could increase to easily get you up into the 70's for efficiency.

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Yeah, I don't doubt that people get great results batch sparging.. and I am impatient, so the hours-long committment to flysparging is probably not for me, not to mention the cost of switching to a false bottom, making sparge arms, etc etc.

Regarding sparge volume, my last batch I went with a larger ratio of sparge to mash water, and that helped a little (also tried beating/rolling the grains a little more when I got home from the LHBS.) But still, efficiency on that one was low 60s.

Sorry. I was confused because it sounded like you were reporting brewhouse efficiency (which is what most people toss around here), but you were actually talking about pre-boil (i.e. extract) efficiency. The volumes are critical to the forumlae, and therein is the problem. I was calculating efficiency thinking that you were citing pre-boil gravity but batch size volume (not pre-boil volume).

Yes, your calculations for extract efficiency are correct. As mentioned previously by others, sparge volume and temperature are the likely culprits. If you can get those managed better, you will undoubtedly shoot up 10% in efficiency easily (probably more). A finer crush will help too.

Don't get too caught up on efficiency, though. Some of the most decorated homebrewers out there AIM for 70 - 75% efficiency. Most brewers are happy with 65% efficiency (in fact, all the recipes in BYO magazine are scaled to 65% efficiency). For some reason, it almost becomes a contest to see who can get their efficiency the highest, but it has nothing to do with brewing good beer. In fact, there are easy ways to get your efficiency up super-high, but it will almost necessarily decrease the quality of your homebrew, so you have to really be cautious and know what you are doing if you go up into the really high percentages.

Best of luck on the next batch -- it sounds like your efficiency problems are easily solved, and I have the highest confidence that your next brew is going to be a good one! Cheers!

I know I am new to AG brewing as well, but an experienced AG brewing friend came over last night as I brewed and pointed out one major probllem that I was having...When I put in my sparge water I did not vigerously stir the grain mixing all the sugars up.
My pre-boil eff went from 43% to 75% just by doing that.

I realize it may not be your problem, but it might help.
Josh

Actually, thats a really critical oversight and it happens frequently with new AG brewers. Good suggestion, just in case.

Another one is using a thermometer that is uncalibrated. I had one batch where my mash was actually about 8 or 9 degrees hotter than what the thermometer was reading. I got terrible efficiency and terrible attenuation.

I'll also throw the batch I did last week out here:

Pale Ale - 10# 2-row, .3# carapils

Mashed with 3 gallons (90 minutes) - didn't have to add any extra water for a temp correction this time! Sparged with 5.8 gallons total (split into 2 separate sparges of equal volume with 10 minute rests after infusing the sparge water.) Extracted a little over 7 gallons of wort. Gravity was 1.032 @ 134F, so 1.046.

Someone mentioned I am probably using a turkey fryer pot - correct. I can only comfortably boil between 6 and 6.5 gallons without worrying about major boilover. Since, for this one, I got over 7 gallons, I ended up putting a gallon aside (did a partigyle-style smaller 2nd batch with some more runnings, and extra sugar that night)

Anyhow, I am a little bit confused as to how I should calculate mash/sparge volumes, especially when using other peoples' recipes. I've used different approaches on almost every batch.

3 of the 4 recipes were ProMash based, which seem to be skewed towards fly sparging numbers? They will list the amount of mash water to use ("before additional infusions"), so I usually take the wort size and subtract the mash volume in the recipe to get the sparge volume.. but it could be that I was not accounting for the boiloff for the desired boiltime.

Here's what I plan to do:

1) Get a grain mill. Probably going to go with the Barley Crusher that NB sells.

2) Get a new kettle. I'd actually love to get one with a spigot and thermometer.. and 10 gallons would definitely allow me to do fuller boils without worrying about the possible mess.

3) Try that 5.2 Mash Stabilizer stuff. Can't hurt I guess. Also should maybe get some pH strips just to make sure stuff is within range.

4) Settle down in the frustration department. The chocolate porter and the belgian pale ale are wonderfully drinkable and enjoyable, even by people other than myself. Even though the OG has been off, I've been getting real lucky with yeast attenuation, so at least that's a positive here.

Now, off to other problems (what can I do to stop having to spend so much on the damn spring water.. but that's another post/search in another forum)

Thanks again.

FlyGuy said:

Actually, thats a really critical oversight and it happens frequently with new AG brewers. Good suggestion, just in case.

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Well, I am mixing pretty well I think - usually every 20 minutes during the mash, too. Though, I am only using my brew spoon - I don't have a mash paddle. Not sure how much that matters.

Another one is using a thermometer that is uncalibrated. I had one batch where my mash was actually about 8 or 9 degrees hotter than what the thermometer was reading. I got terrible efficiency and terrible attenuation.

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I am using a pretty new digital thermometer and it seems to be pretty spot on when I check it with other known temps - and my mashes have been within whatever ranges are appropriate, I'd guess, since my attenuation rates have been anywhere from 75 to 85 percent.

You have a real good understanding of the process and I'm pretty sure you are on your way. Check into campden tablets to treat your water for chloramines.

kmudrick said:

I'll also throw the batch I did last week out here:

Pale Ale - 10# 2-row, .3# carapils

Mashed with 3 gallons (90 minutes) - didn't have to add any extra water for a temp correction this time! Sparged with 5.8 gallons total (split into 2 separate sparges of equal volume with 10 minute rests after infusing the sparge water.) Extracted a little over 7 gallons of wort. Gravity was 1.032 @ 134F, so 1.046.

Thanks again.

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Um, that was 89% extract efficiency. What's wrong with that?

Bobby_M said:

Um, that was 89% extract efficiency. What's wrong with that?

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Hmm, you're right. Looking at my notes, I had two numbers written down, 1.046 and 1.037. I am guessing I poorly stirred before taking the first reading and got too much of the sweeter concentration. I used my thief for getting a sample from the pot. Given that I kept a gallon aside since it did not fit in the pot comfortably (to 6 gallons) and I boiled off a gallon, and my gravity at yeast pitching time was 1.048, I am guessing that the 1.037 was a more accurate number.

But, I think this is just proving that I am apparently really sloppy in my measurements... Or the fact that it was well after midnight by the time I was at that stage - started the strike water heating at, oh, 10pm that night

Followup: Bought a barley crusher, just used it today. Using the default gap, I got a much finer crush than I have gotten at LHBSs around here. Made a simple american pale ale and got 73% efficiency! Yay! Also trying out treating the water with potassium metasbisulfite - will know in a couple weeks whether that was worthwhile in destroying the evil chloramines that lurk in my water