brewhouse efficiency for extract brewing

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abweatherley

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Hello all

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you.

So I have been using Brewers friend to scale some recipes from 5 gallons down tov1 gallon.

Here's my question would brewhouse efficiency be 100% because I have technical collected all of the wort I need through buying and diluting my malt extract. Or would it be 0% because I didn't create wort from grain.
 
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Brewhouse efficiency takes into account all losses in your system up to going into your fermenter. So trub losses, tubing, etc are included in Brewhouse.

If you don't lose any extract in your process to get to the fermenter, then it would be 100%.
 
The brewer's friend website states that efficiency for extract recipes only applies to the steeping grains and that 25% is a good place to start. Otherwise, the losses that relate to brewhouse efficiency are not linear so you wouldn't want to use that variable as a percentage for scaling a recipe. The difference between mash efficiency and brewhouse efficiency is typically fixed-volume losses (eg. dead space in a kettle).
 
I use Brewer's Friend as well. The efficiency is related to the steeping grains only. I start at 70% when I build an extract recipe, then adjust the efficiency based on what my OG and FG numbers are after the brew day. I currently just finished a D-rest on my Baltic Lager this morning. My initial expected OG was 1.079 with an efficiency of 75%. Brew day numbers were a few points short, 1.077 and an efficiency of 65%. One of the big things is knowing where your losses are(transferring from boil kettle to fermenter and then packaged amount), so you know what your starting volumes of water should be. I generally lose about 1.5 quarts of wort when I transfer to my fermenter and then another quart in my fermenter due to a sample here or there and the small loss from the cone of my fermenter.
 
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