Efficiency Troubleshooting

Hopefully someone can help me out with this. Second AG attempt. The flow and everything went pretty well. My first attempt yielded about 58% efficiency. Bleh.

So, utilizing BeerSmith and well laid plans, my session yesterday yielded about 63% efficiency. 5gal cooler w/ false bottom, batch sparge. Nothing special about the grainbill - 13lbs malt (11lbs 2-row). Mashed at about 1.1qt/lb (~3.5gal) 152F and sparged with two portions of 2gal.

I took grav readings of both runnoffs and preboil. I hit mash temp just fine as well as all my other numbers, (based on 60% efficiency). Off the top of my head, the second runoff was around 1.025 (seems pretty high, still).

Is there a way to gain a better efficiency? I'm assuming the second runnings being so high in grav is a good indication that i'm not extracting as well as i could? I'm still assuming i'm not sparging well enough. Is 4gal+ not enough sparge water for 13lbs grain?

Thanks in advance.

Welcome to HBT!

Without running the numbers, your total amount of sparge water sounds a little low to me - especially in light of your lower water:grain ratio in the mash. However since you used beersmith I'm surprised if it's low unless you have a lot of dead space in your equipment that beersmith didn't know about.

Deadspace below the false bottom is 1qt. But before i did the initial runoff, i added 1qt of water at sparge temp (170F).

That's another thing, I didn't know if BeerSmith would give me a "reasonable" sparge volume to optimize efficiency or if it would just give me a sparge volume that would work in hitting my target boil volume (efficiency be damned).

Beersmith works both ways I believe. You just have to tell it which way you want it to behave.
How is the crush of your grain? That can make a big difference.

Yes, I think that is the way the software works- it'll give you the amount of sparge water to get to your desired boil volume, not the amount for best efficiency. I think it was Richbrewer who made a sticky in this forum (check just above this thread) about how to increase efficieny.

Oops. That was one thing i was going to mention. I double crushed it this time at the LHBS since my first AG attempt was so low - upon others' advice that that is usually the first culprit. Looked very fine but no stuck sparge, so i thought it was pretty sufficient.

Another consideration is your grain crush... the single most influential change I made when starting AG to boost my efficiency. I went from the 60's to the 80's in one felled swoop after adjusting my Corona Mill per some of the suggestions on Homebrewtalk.com. Now with my new Barley Crusher I've just purchased I'm very excited to see what effect an excellent crush will have on the quality of my brew.

Ugh... late to the dance as always... guess I'm a slow typer!!!

+1 on the crush being a big part of getting good efficency.
+1 on your sparge volumes looking a little low. Personaly I take what beersmith gives me and add a gallon or so because I always seem to come out a bit low on volume following their instructions. It takes a while to dial in your equipment and learn the little tricks that make the process work for you.

The other thing that upped my effecency was recirculating my mash, a mash out, and upping my sparge water temperature. Again, this is learning to work with my equipment instead of working against it.

I've been having efficiency problems also. I tried everything. The only major change came when I recrushed the grains.

Sparge water probably needs to be around 185 degrees to get the grain bed up to 170. What was you sparge water temp? I have to dial that number into Beersmith myself.

I used 171F (as two 2-gallon sparges) to keep the grain bed around 165F. Didn't want to get too close to 170F.

165-170 is a good range for sparging... hummm.....

Stupid question, did you adjust your hydrometer for temperature? It mesures lower with higher temperature, so you might be doing better than you think.

I got a very large increase in efficiency when I did 2 batch sparges instead of one. I figured out the total sparge volume (.5 gallons / lb) and then split it into 2 sparges with equal volume in each. I'm not sure if this is necessarily correct, maybe you should have more sparge water in the first or second, but this worked very well for me.

I also stirred the mash and sparge much more (which probably also increased the efficiency). I was too worried about temperature loss and probably didn't stir enough the first two times doing a partial mash.

You mentioned that you added 1-qt of 170º water before the initial run-off. This is not enough water or hot enough water for a true mashout. For my mashout, I usually add 4-6 qts of 200º water before the initial run-off. This raises the temp of the grainbed to about 167º. Tell BeerSmith you want to do a mashout and it will tell you how much water to use and what temp it should be.

My procedure is to mash at 1.25 qts/water per pound of grain, do a mash-out, and a single batch sparge. I get 85-90 percent efficiency with this method (sometimes higher with small grain bills). I don't adjust my water chemistry in any way, and I do crush my own grains with a Barley Crusher.

Pay attention to your volume measurements because they have a big impact on your gravity readings. 2 quarts of water can be the difference between 1.045 and 1.050. I measure the volume of my strike water, mashout water, sparge water, first runnings and sparge runnings in the same bucket. This way I am confident that my water volumes are being measured consistently.

Consistent efficiency is better than high efficiency, IMO. Once you nail down your efficiency (whatever it may be), it becomes so much easier to confidently design recipes to hit your target gravities & IBUs.

Yes, i did convert the gravs for temp.

I'm thinking that the sparge volume is the key here. 0.5gal/lb would put my total sparge volume around 6.5gal. I used 4gal total.

I used 1quart topoff not as a mashout, but to compensate for dead volume. Probably didn't do it right, but i tried. I could only add 1 more quart as the mash was to the top of the tun.

All being said, I know what my limitations are now, and I'm working it into the future proceedings. I can only boil about 7gal(hot) due to the size of my boilpot, and i can only mash at most 14lbs of grain (at 1.1qt/lb) due to the size of my mash/lauter tun.