A few efficiency questions

[TwoWheeler]

Did my second AG batch*, and, for simplicity's sake, I used Northern Brewer's Belgian Strong Golden Ale kit. (SGA is my "house beer" and I was looking for a starting recipe).

My OG was SUPPOSED to be 1.081 but was 1.07 - checked with both a hydrometer and a refractometer.

Is this a huge inefficiency?

Would it have been a good idea to add a little DME to the boil to make up the difference?

Mashing 13 lbs of grain in a 5 gallon cooler is probably pushing the envelope, but all the grain and all the water (volume from an online calculator) just fit. Probably not the hot setup for efficiency.....

The PH of the first runnings was around 5 - a little light, perhaps. Would that make any difference in efficiency? Should I have "corrected" it to 5.4? How?

Dough in was at 152 degrees and I let it sit for 90 minutes. Then, I added water @ 168. I recirculated the runoff until it was pretty clear, then did a fly sparge.


Thoughts? Insults? Death threats?





*but the first one where I actually tried to do things "by the book". My first AG batch, I just said "WTH" and kind of threw together. No measurements, did everything "wrong".....best beer I ever brewed!

 

[ChemE]

What was your volume of wort into the fermenter and how accurately was this measured? This will be a smaller beer than you designed but your efficiency may not have been bad depending on the volume you made.

 

[TwoWheeler]

What was your volume of wort into the fermenter and how accurately was this measured?

I think I hit the five gallon mark - based on the notoriously inaccurate "lines on the bucket"....

I'm not super concerned about this batch - it'll be fine, I'm sure - just looking to learn a little.

 

[ChemE]

I think I hit the five gallon mark - based on the notoriously inaccurate "lines on the bucket"....

I'm not super concerned about this batch - it'll be fine, I'm sure - just looking to learn a little.

I suspected that may be the case. If you want to be able to refine your technique it would help to be able to measure volume as precisely as we measure density and mass. The graduating carboys link in my signature works flawlessly to this end.

 

[ChemE]

Without knowing exactly what grains the kit includes, I've just treated all thirteen pounds as base grain (which will hurt your efficiency since crystal has less extract potential). In doing so I get a brewhouse efficiency of 74.78% which is not shameful. To hit the intended OG of 1.081 you would have had to hit 86.5% brewhouse efficiency. That seems unreasonable as a kit since very few homebrewers hit that sort of number. Did the kit come with any syrup?

EDIT: http://www.northernbrewer.com/documentation/allgrain/AG-BelgianStrongGolden.pdf

2# of clear candi sugar will certainly help things out! So is your 1.070 after the sugar addition or before?

 

[ChemE]

Okay so it looks like taking the sugar addition into account your efficiency into the boiler was 59.5%. I did a barleywine a few months ago with 11 pounds of grain and I only have a 5 gallon MLT so you certainly can get perfectly fine efficiency with a small MLT. I'm going to guess that the crush was nothing spectacular right?

 

[TwoWheeler]

Okay so it looks like taking the sugar addition into account your efficiency into the boiler was 59.5%.

Hmmm. Not very good - even allowing for the fudge factor of the imprecise quantity of water in the fermenter. I'd say I need to work on my mashing technique....

Is there a better way to control temps besides "dump some hot water in, stir, hope, and measure"?

Does the PH play into it at all?

 

[ChemE]

Hmmm. Not very good - even allowing for the fudge factor of the imprecise quantity of water in the fermenter. I'd say I need to work on my mashing technique....

Is there a better way to control temps besides "dump some hot water in, stir, hope, and measure"?

Does the PH play into it at all?

BeerSmith is a godsend for calculating strike volumes and temperature. pH does indeed make a difference but unless you have crazy hard or soft water your pH is probably fine. You need to try to isolate whether your lack of efficiency is coming from a lack of conversion or a lack of lautering. Measure the gravity of your mash just before you start running off. This combined with the weight of the grains and volume of strike water will allow you to calculate your conversion efficiency. It isn't unreasonable to expect high 90's for conversion efficiency.

Isolating where the problem is is the first step for sure.

 

[TwoWheeler]

Measure the gravity of your mash just before you start running off. This combined with the weight of the grains and volume of strike water will allow you to calculate your conversion efficiency.

Isolating where the problem is is the first step for sure.

I'll have to try that, next batch.

In reading some other threads on here, I think I'm draining the runoff WAAAAAYYYY too fast when sparging, too.

I'm not taking anywhere near as long as most folks say they are.

 

[sonex]

the biggest gains in efficiency is usually the crush, closing the gap on your mill can make a big difference. I always take a hit in efficiency when doing big beers. normal efficiency on beers under 1.050 are always above 80%, and my big beers (over 1.080) efficiency dops into the 60's. so some of your efficiency hit could be from the big grain bill.

 

[ChemE]

Agreed. I always measure the gravity of my final runnings. This lets me work out how much sugar was left in the grain bed during the post mortem. The efficiency loss is usually insignificant except for my beers over 1.100. There it isn't unusual for me to lose 15% of my sugar in the grain bed. I doubt we find very much of the missing 40% there.

 

[ajf]

I've made some beers with close to 13# grain, and fly sparged in a 5g cooler.
It was a very tight fit, and with 85% efficiency, I would get an OG of about 1.075 with no sugar. To do that, I had to sparge for about 90 minutes as opposed to 45 - 60 minutes with only 10# grain.

-a.

 

[TwoWheeler]

I had to sparge for about 90 minutes as opposed to 45 - 60 minutes with only 10# grain..

If that's the norm, I am sparging WAAAAAY too fast - like, 15 minutes....

 

[NyPDFustercluck]

+1 ^ when I fly sparge, it doesn't take much more than 15 min for a 13# grain bill. Are we doing something horribly wrong? My efficiency isn't horrible (65-75) and I've hit my target pre and post boil gravities right on the $

 

[ajf]

I found a long time ago that if I fly sparged too fast me efficiency went down.
I normally stop the sparge when the gravity of the runnings gets down to about 1.010, and if I sparge fast the gravity of the runnings gets down to that value a long time before I have reached my pre-boil volume.
I also found that if at the end of a fast sparge I stirred up the grains in the remaining sparge water, and took a gravity reading, then that gravity reading would be much higher than the gravity of the last runnings, but if I sparge slower there is very little difference.
This seems to suggest that I get channeling if I sparge too fast, but not if I sparge slow enough.
I've also found that I can sparge considerably faster with a 10g MLT rather than the 5g. I put this down to the fact that the cross sectional area of the 10g cooler is about 1.7 times that of the 5g so you should be able reduce the sparge time by a factor of 1.7 while still maintaining the same flow rate through the grains.

-a.