Where did my sugar go?

I tried my first mini-mash yesterday. I did the mashing in two gallons of water on the stove sparged with 1.625 quarts of water. Then all that went into a large kettle on an outdoor burner with another three gallons of water. Brought to a boil and added the LME then proceeded as normal.

Once I put the wort into the primary, I had a little under 4 gallons left. Between boil-off and leaving some in the kettle with the trub, that number made sense to me. But then I checked the OG and I was spot on at 1.050 (target given by the recipe was 1.052). The recipe was for 5.25 gallons though, so the OG should have been higher with a need for some watering down. I measured twice, so I don't think it was a bad reading.

The only thing I can think is that I didn't get as much sugar out of the mash/sparge as I should have. My mash temperature dropped bellow 150F at one point before I got the heat adjusted properly. I'm thinking I lost some efficiency due to a period of too low of a temperature. Also, when I was sparging, the size of my strainer relative to my grains left me with a more spherical shape so maybe I didn't get a good wash out of sugars on the sparge?

Any ideas?

 

I think if you're going to obtain any kind of efficiency you'll need to design a small mash tun. Not to say you can't make do with strainers and other more common kitchen items after some trial and error. If I had to guess 65% efficiency would be a reasonable number. Personally I built a mini-mash tun out of a 2 gallon cooler. It clocked an 89% efficiency yesterday. The trade off was a painfully slow run off.


What was the recipe?

 

i don't know what you are talking about. i read twice and it seems like you are asking why you got 1.050 instead of 1.052. that's COMPLETELY normal. there's a million reasons why you could be 0.002 off from the specific gravity the recipe predicted.

 

Don't have the exact recipe with me right now, but it was the mini-mash AHS Holiday Ale.

http://www.austinhomebrew.com/product_info.php?cPath=178_452_609&products_id=358