Bavarian Wheat recipe help

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mondayshero

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Hi there.
I brewed and Bavarian Wheat last night and ended up with 120% efficiency due to boil downs, etc. in having trouble scaling it for next time because iBrewmaster 2 doesn't allow for 120% efficiency.

Any help would be helpful.

Recipe for Sentinel Hefeweizen:
5 lbs white wheat (54%)
3 lbs Pilsen 2-row
1 lb rye malt (I know, taboo)

Crystal hops.
Weihenstephan yeast.

Mashed decoction.
Got 2.5 gallons from first pull. This was set to boil for 2 hours. (1.070).
Sparge second gyle 1.020- 4 gallons. Boiled 90 minutes.
Ended up after boil with 1.090 and 1.030 for first and second gyle. Cooked and checked gravity - 1.065. Goal was 1.046 at estimated 80% eff. Since I gained a third should I reduce grain bill to 75% of total?

Thanks in advance!
 
I ended up adding 7 Qts to get to goal. (Had only a little over 4 gallons left at end) So the good news I ended up with about 6 gallons... So that's good
 
Ok, i realize it's actually 50% more efficiency. So I would reduce to 2/3 total grain bill?
 
I'm not sure I understand what's going on here, 120% efficiency is physically impossible.

Are you saying that your gravity ended up too high but your wort volume was too low? If that's the case, then no, you don't need to reduce the grains, you need to increase the water so that the same sugar content remains but the volume increases to bring you to your correct gravity.
 
Thanks! I was overthinking and thing and my brain wasn't working out the obvious. That's exactly what I needed to be reminded of.
(In iBrewMaster you fill out actual OG and it gives you your "efficiency" which read as 120%, meaning I had 50% more sugars than originally estimated.)

This answers a ton of questions that have arisen for the next big batch I'll be doing in February as a parti-gyle.
 
Thanks! I was overthinking and thing and my brain wasn't working out the obvious. That's exactly what I needed to be reminded of.
(In iBrewMaster you fill out actual OG and it gives you your "efficiency" which read as 120%, meaning I had 50% more sugars than originally estimated.)

This answers a ton of questions that have arisen for the next big batch I'll be doing in February as a parti-gyle.

You'd probably find that if you had the correct volumes in there, the efficiency wasn't that high. If you had that gravity at the correct volume then yes, but like I said exceeding 100% efficiency requires creating sugar out of nothing. Grains have a limit. It was likely assuming you had that gravity at the appropriate batch volume, otherwise there's something else configured incorrectly (not familiar with iBrewmaster so I don't know).

I would see if your boiloff rate isn't a lot higher than is set in your software. And you may well exceed 80% efficiency (i get 85-88%, or upwards of 90% if i do partigyles or Lamebic or other super-sparged beer, but you won't get to 100%, and you don't want to either) in which case you could reduce grain weight a bit, but you could also just increase batch size. That's part of why I eventually switched from 5 to 5.5 gallon batches.
 

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