Efficiency issues. Missing OG

[Stushimi]

Helloooo Everyone,

I know this is common for people just switching to all-grain and I've gone through a lot of the stickies in the all-grain forum and have used the calculators online to get my water levels, etc but 2 times in a row I'm missing OG significantly.

Long story short I brewed a week ago and hit an OG of 1.041 I brewed the exact same recipe again yesterday with the intent of getting better efficiency and it was considerably worse 1.030 with a target OG of 1.051.

The recipe is below, which you might recognize as being the BeeCave Brewery Haus Pale Ale

Grain Bill
8 lbs. 2-Row Pale Malt
2 lbs. Vienna Malt
0.5 lb. Crystal 10L Malt

Mash
Single Infusion mash for 60 minutes at 152 degrees. (This is where I think I went wrong and on my second brew my strike water was 172 instead of the calculated 166 that I was supposed to have. I had to vigorously stir for ~5 minutes to get to 153ish temps)

I batch sparge in a 10 gallon water cooler with a stainless braid manifold.
Dough-in with 3.5 gallons of water (1.33qt/lb). Vorlauf and have another 4.5 gallons of 175 degree water ready for the batch sparge, I only do one. I then get about 6.5 gallons to the kettle for the boil.

I get my grain from Austin Homebrew Supply and did so both times. I will say that I had an additional half gallon go into the fermenter on the second brew mostly due to water loss as I was more familiar with the setup the second time.

I guess my question is whether its possible I destroyed enzymes with the 172 strike temp in my second brew and wasnt able to get sugars from the grain or is me missing my OG more likely to do with my grain crush?

Any insight is much appreciated! Thanks everyone

 

[HB_ATL73]

Helloooo Everyone,

I know this is common for people just switching to all-grain and I've gone through a lot of the stickies in the all-grain forum and have used the calculators online to get my water levels, etc but 2 times in a row I'm missing OG significantly.

Long story short I brewed a week ago and hit an OG of 1.041 I brewed the exact same recipe again yesterday with the intent of getting better efficiency and it was considerably worse 1.030 with a target OG of 1.051.

The recipe is below, which you might recognize as being the BeeCave Brewery Haus Pale Ale

Grain Bill
8 lbs. 2-Row Pale Malt
2 lbs. Vienna Malt
0.5 lb. Crystal 10L Malt

Mash
Single Infusion mash for 60 minutes at 152 degrees. (This is where I think I went wrong and on my second brew my strike water was 172 instead of the calculated 166 that I was supposed to have. I had to vigorously stir for ~5 minutes to get to 153ish temps)

I batch sparge in a 10 gallon water cooler with a stainless braid manifold.
Dough-in with 3.5 gallons of water (1.33qt/lb). Vorlauf and have another 4.5 gallons of 175 degree water ready for the batch sparge, I only do one. I then get about 6.5 gallons to the kettle for the boil.

I get my grain from Austin Homebrew Supply and did so both times. I will say that I had an additional half gallon go into the fermenter on the second brew mostly due to water loss as I was more familiar with the setup the second time.

I guess my question is whether its possible I destroyed enzymes with the 172 strike temp in my second brew and wasnt able to get sugars from the grain or is me missing my OG more likely to do with my grain crush?

Any insight is much appreciated! Thanks everyone

Read this article. https://byo.com/mr-wizard/mash-temperatures/

Also, your strike temp was not that high. From the calculations i did you would have hit a mash temp of 158 degrees with that grain bill and strike temp. A high temp mash will result in less starch conversion leaving a beer with more unfermentable dextrines but i dont believe it would cause a 20 pt drop in gravity.. maybe someone else can back me up on that. It may be an issue with the grain crush as well.
Another method on brew day is if you heat your water and miss the strike temp too high you can always add small amounts of water to bring the temp down ( or wait and let it cool) this will only slighty raise the water/grain ratio. Never have had issues doing that

 

[RM-MN]

Who mills your grain? The crush of the grain is the most significant part of the mash efficiency. If you get a coarse crush, the only way to get a higher OG is to mash longer with the hopes that the water will be able to get to the center of the grain particle and gelatinize the starches so the enzymes can work on them.

 

[RealRayDizzle]

Agree with RM-MN. I get my grain crushed from Austin Home brew supply. people mess with the settings, plus their mill is fairly old. My efficiency was all over the place until I started asking them to make sure it is dialed in correctly, now I have been holding at a more steady 68% ( single infusion, batch sparge)

 

[CascadesBrewer]

I will say that for years I did all grain without my own mill, and the source of the pre-crush grains caused significant swings in my efficiency numbers. It sounds like you got your grain from the same source, so the difference should be minimal (though in theory they might have crushed them differently).

Since you ended up with more volume, you would expect your OG to be lower (one beer just had more water in it). The difference between 5.5 gal vs 5.0 gal is around 10%...so that would only account for a 1.041 to 1.037 drop.

AFAIK, that strike water temp is not high enough to denature the enzymes, so I don't think that played into your difference.

Other than that, your process seems pretty reasonable. In my book, hitting a high efficiency is not that critical but it is good to have a predictable efficiency number (though in your case, 1.030 seems quite a bit lower than expected for 10.5 lbs of grain). My suggestion would be to measure volumes at each step and measure your gravity pre-boil and post-boil.

 

[Stushimi]

Should've clarified that I get my grain and have it crushed at Austin Homebrew Supply. At this point I'm going to do this again, same recipe and process, for a third time but this time with a finer crush, likely run it through the mill twice.

1.030 seems incredibly low

 

[HB_ATL73]

Sounds like a good idea. I think most people are agreeing your temps wouldn't have affected your OG that drastically. Try to hit your target temp and keep all other variables the same and with that finer crush I bet you will see a big leap in the gravity.

 

[balrog]

Final vol? You mention boil vol in one case, no final vols. That'll impact things. You got to get a handle on volumes.

 

[Stushimi]

I boil off about .75gallons/hr and did so in both cases here.

I'll keep you all updated about the crush hypothesis, might not be for a couple weeks judging by my calendar.

 

[eric19312]

Yes crush matters and my efficiencies are still all over the board since I scrapped my barley crusher and "upgraded" to a MM3. I will get it dialed in but I do miss the predictability.

When I used to batch sparge I found a really important step in getting good efficiency was how carefully I stirred in the sparge water. Like five minutes of aggressive stirring is not too much. You really need to get that sparge water mixing into and out of the grain in order equalize the concentration of sugar in the moisture that you lauter out to your kettle and the moisture that you leave behind in your grain bed. If you just mix a little the wort you remove by lautering will absolutely be less concentrated than the wort that you leave behind and your efficiency will suffer.

I'd recommend a read of braukaiser's efficiency blog found here
http://www.braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?title=Understanding_Efficiency

Especially helpful when chasing down efficiency issues to have a good understanding of difference between conversion efficiency and lauter efficiency and to know how to measure both. Your question about whether the strike water was too hot and denatured enzymes (I am sure the answer is no) would easily be answered by checking your conversion efficiency before you start collecting first runnings.

Last note...as @balrog mentioned you need to get a handle on your volumes. I'm not saying you don't but I see a lot of brewers measuring grain to the nearest tenth of an ounce and then measuring water with a "calibrated" stick. The volume measurements are every bit as important as the weight measurements no, way point in being a lot more accurate with one than the other.

 

[doug293cz]

Final vol? You mention boil vol in one case, no final vols. That'll impact things. You got to get a handle on volumes.

Boil off volume does not affect efficiency, unless you boil over/spill a lot of wort. Efficiency is determined by the amounts of extract (mostly sugar) at the various process steps, and no extract is lost by boiling (only water.)

You do need to have accurate volume measurements (corrected for expansion to a standard temp like 68°F (20°C)), in order to get accurate efficiency calculations, as noted previously.

Brew on

 

[balrog]

Absolutely. Sugars don't magically appear or disappear. SG measurements depend on sugars in solution and the volume. Getting good extraction/lauter efficiency (lots of sugar) but have too much liquid? SG will be low. And, as in many cases, it's likely the combination of eff and vol, but anything major is more likely to be extraction/lautering.