What sort of efficency are you getting?

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mezman

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My first two AGs have been what I perceive to be low efficency brews, on the order of about 60%. The one I did today came out to be 58%.

So, that being said, what sort of efficency is normal?

Just so you now what I did this time around:

12 lbs of British 2 row plus about 2.5 lbs of speciality grains.
Mash in with 4.5 gallons of water and hold at 152 for 60 minutes.
Added pH stabilizer to mash (5-star chemicals)
Batch sparged with 3.5 gallons of 170 water
used iodone to check for conversion completion.

Target OG was 1.082, acheived OG was 1.068. A bit of a difference there.

Is this normal? Or am I missing something fundamental?

Thanks
 
Based on my calculation your at 77% efficiency for a 5 gallon batch assuming 1.037 lb/gal.

Are you boiling down your wort?

Whats the volume of the batch when your taking the reading?
 
mezman said:
Just so you now what I did this time around:

12 lbs of British 2 row plus about 2.5 lbs of speciality grains.
Mash in with 4.5 gallons of water and hold at 152 for 60 minutes.
Added pH stabilizer to mash (5-star chemicals)
Batch sparged with 3.5 gallons of 170 water
used iodone to check for conversion completion.

Target OG was 1.082, acheived OG was 1.068. A bit of a difference there.

Is this normal? Or am I missing something fundamental?

Thanks
Click to expand...
With that much grain I would say you need at least 7 1/2 gallons of sparge water. I would say you are leaving sugars in the mash. Or did you batch sparge twice with 3 1/2 gallons each?
 
There's a couple of things that don't look quite right to me.

First, you sparged with 3.5g 170 degree water. This is not enough sparge water for a 5g batch. I don't normally use as much grain as you mentioned, but use about 6 gallons of sparge water.

Second, the weight of your mash will be over 50# at 152 degrees.
If you sparge with 28# water at 170 degrees, then you actual sparge temperature will be somewhere around 160 degrees or less.
If you add 1 - 1.5g near boiling water to the mash to raise the temp to 170 before starting the sparge, you will considerably increase your efficiency.

-a.
 
A hotter first sparge & a second sparge with 3.5 gallons of 180F water would probably solve the problem. Also, stir the grain bed and recirculate to settle before the second & third runnings. A target gravity that high means 8-9 gallons and a lot of boil down.
 
I only have a 7.5 gallon pot so I collected a little over 7 gallons and boiled it down to a little over 5, which I used to take my reading.

My sparge was one sparge with 3.5 gallons only. Would I have been better served if I did two 1.25 gallon sparges?

So if my pot is only 7.5 gallons, what sort of OGs should I be looking as a max? Thanks again.
 
You either need a larger brew pot or to make smaller or lighter batches with your current equipment. Two small sparges will not help.

-a.
 
ajf said:
You either need a larger brew pot or to make smaller or lighter batches with your current equipment. Two small sparges will not help.

-a.
Click to expand...

Or store some wort in your primary, or other container, until it boils down enough to add it in. The only thing I've read against this is boiling it at least one hour after in order to get the hot break and add the hops. I boil off 1 gal per hour here in Missouri so it takes awhile.
 
My pot is only 7.5 gal also but you can only fit about 6 gallons in it to prevent boil overs. Collect the other couple of gallons in another pot and put it on the stove to get it boiling and reducing. I do 90 min boils and slowly add the remaining wort into the brew kettle over an hour. The boil volume stays pretty close to 6 gallons until about 30 min left in the boil.

Other than that, get a bigger pot. I'm contemplating that currently.

For a beer that big, you will need at least a 90 min boil, probably closer to 2 hours. You may want to consider using a portion of malt extract in high gravity brews just to keep the mash and boil volume and time down. My doppelbock took forever to boil because even though I did a 3 gallon brew, I had about 12 lbs of grain and collected over 8 gallons of wort. I boiled it down for a few hours before I had the 4 gallon volume to start the hop schedule.
 
So then what's the rule for how much wort to collect per pound? Is it .66 gallons per pound of grain?

I can boil down pretty quick since it's so dry here in Colorado typically. In my hour long boil yesterday, my 7 gallons of wort went down to a little over 5.
 
So I am posting a help in this thread.....

I brewed an Octoberfest Ale this past weekend....used two different strains of yeast that I had leftover from previous batches that I made a starter with. The starter I made seemed to do okay, not great action but I thought it would be enough to get things going and grow from there. I started bubbling away about 6hrs after pitching. It never really did bubble that great though and only bubbled for about 2 days, if that. So I tried to aerate the wort a little to see if that would do anything.....did nothing...There was very minimal krausen as well....so I took a gravity reading. My starting OG was right about 1.54, when I took the reading 2 days ago it was about 1.26. I thought maybe try racking it off the yeast and back on to get it going again. There was very little slurry at the bottom as well. So yesterday I went and got a new vial of liquid yeast and pitched that. I still have no action.....and now my 2 piece airlock is not even moving, which it did before.....so what the heck is up with this? HELP!!!!
 
You have probably knocked most of the CO2 out of solution. That doesn't mean that fermentation has stopped. The release of CO2 doesn't mean (necessarily) that fermentation is underway, but that CO2 has reached the level of supersaturation, and it's being released. Conversely, the absence of bubbling doesn't mean that fermentation has stopped, either. It just means that the amount of CO2 in solution hasn't reached supersaturation. Especially since you have pitched more yeast, you should wait a couple of days to see if the airlock begins to bubble again. Although i would expect it to bubble more slowly now, since the height of your fermentation has passed.

In the future, you may want to refrain from oxegynating your wort after fermentation begins. The oxygen is good initially, so that the yeast can reproduce to being their job, but you'll want to avoid oxygenation afterward.
 
Ooppss......I guess I thought that I needed to aerate the new yeast again to get it going. So will the new yeast kick in then and when should I look to test the gravity again and rack to secondary? Thanks for your help!!!!
 
:off:
GABrewboy said:
So I am posting a help in this thread.....

I brewed an Octoberfest Ale this past weekend....used two different strains of yeast that I had leftover from previous batches that I made a starter with. The starter I made seemed to do okay, not great action but I thought it would be enough to get things going and grow from there. I started bubbling away about 6hrs after pitching. It never really did bubble that great though and only bubbled for about 2 days, if that. So I tried to aerate the wort a little to see if that would do anything.....did nothing...There was very minimal krausen as well....so I took a gravity reading. My starting OG was right about 1.54, when I took the reading 2 days ago it was about 1.26. I thought maybe try racking it off the yeast and back on to get it going again. There was very little slurry at the bottom as well. So yesterday I went and got a new vial of liquid yeast and pitched that. I still have no action.....and now my 2 piece airlock is not even moving, which it did before.....so what the heck is up with this? HELP!!!!
Click to expand...

It's really poor manners to hijack someone else's thread.:off:

So, anyway, is there a rule as to the amount of sparge water one needs in relation to the amount of grain when batch sparging? If I had 14.5 pounds of grain, and mashed at 1.25 qt/lb, then I have 4.5 gallons in the mash, assume about a gallon is absorbed into the grain, I will have a first running volume of about 3.5 gallons. So if I need to collect 8-9 gallons of wort for this big of a beer, we are talking about 5.5 gallons of sparge, or about .33 gal/pound?

Thanks for the help.
 
Well there was a problem with posting new threads yesterday so I had to post it here.......
 
mezman said:
:off:

It's really poor manners to hijack someone else's thread.:off:

So, anyway, is there a rule as to the amount of sparge water one needs in relation to the amount of grain when batch sparging? If I had 14.5 pounds of grain, and mashed at 1.25 qt/lb, then I have 4.5 gallons in the mash, assume about a gallon is absorbed into the grain, I will have a first running volume of about 3.5 gallons. So if I need to collect 8-9 gallons of wort for this big of a beer, we are talking about 5.5 gallons of sparge, or about .33 gal/pound?

Thanks for the help.
Click to expand...

How are you determining that you need 8-9 gallons of wort? This is where I seem to be getting lost. If you get 3.5G the first sparge why not just add another 3.5G for the second?
 
I was going off the post by RichBrewer:
RichBrewer said:
With that much grain I would say you need at least 7 1/2 gallons of sparge water.
Click to expand...

And David_42:
david_42 said:
A target gravity that high means 8-9 gallons and a lot of boil down.
Click to expand...

That's what lead me to the 8-9 gallons of wort pre-boil.
 
I think that is where I just don't understand. I'll have to review that section in Palmers book again.


Update, I checked that section, says 1.5 times as much water for sparge as mash. So in your example you had 3.5 initally and you would want 1.5 times that giving you a total of 8.75G.

Correct?
 
Yikes, that's a spicy meatball of sparge water. So by those numbers, with a 7.5 gallon boil kettle, I can't really go over 9 lbs of grain if we are assuming a mash volume of 1.25 qt/lb. I guess that's alright for most beers though.

I'll have to come up with something clever if I ever try to make a bock or even a doppelbock or some other high gravity beer.
 
mezman said:
Yikes, that's a spicy meatball of sparge water. So by those numbers, with a 7.5 gallon boil kettle, I can't really go over 9 lbs of grain if we are assuming a mash volume of 1.25 qt/lb. I guess that's alright for most beers though.

I'll have to come up with something clever if I ever try to make a bock or even a doppelbock or some other high gravity beer.
Click to expand...


I was trying to figure out how much sparge I would need for a 10 gallon batch of 1.085 OG beer and I came up with 33 gallons total, can that possibly be right? I used 70% efficiency as an estimate.
 
hello there, i use a spinning spray sparger, what's this batch sparging, is this simply re filling the mash tun with a new batch of hot water. if so what are teh pros and cons?. cheers stegnest.
 

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