Steve973
Well-Known Member
Lately, my brewing buddy and I have been making high gravity (Belgian) beer. On Sunday, we mashed 14 pounds of pilsener malt in 21 quarts of water, which comes out to 1.5 quarts/pound. We seem to have efficiency isses when doing this. I think the problem arises from too much water in the mash, which takes away from sparge water volume, so some sugars get left behind. We're trying to mash for attenuation, so we mash with lots of water at lower temperatures. We recycle until the runnings are clear, then drain the wort off of the grain until we have between a half-inch and an inch of wort above the grain bed, and then we begin sparging. For a 5 gallon batch, we didn't need too much sparge water before we obtained our pre-boil target volume. With the pils malt and 2 lbs of candy sugar, our OG turned out to be 1.084 which doesn't sound too bad until you realize that we were shooting for 1.096 for 75% efficiency. Our efficiency was 63%, and we'd like to improve. Any ideas, or can anybody point out a major flaw in our procedure? Thanks in advance!