Confused

[danorocks17]

So today my brew buddy and I brewed my yearly christmas ale. This is the first year i've done it AG and this is only my 3rd AG batch. i have a 70qt rectangle cooler as my MLT and I batch sparge. So I put in the recipe in beer calculus (been using it a long time, never steered me wrong) and long story short I mashed in and did a mash out with too much water. I was pissed because my boil kettle is only 32qt and I had 6 1/2 gallons. I was going to boil off about a gallon or so and sparge but my buddy said "**** it, lets just see what happens". So we proceeded without a sparge and at the end of it all we ended up with an og of 1.63, which according to the software put us at around 74% efficiency.

So my question is, how did i get such a high efficiency without a sparge? I was shooting for 70%. my water/grain ratio was 1.5 qts and i mashed at 152. needless to say I am happy with how it came out, but perplexed.

 

[BulldogBrewer]

How Much grain?

 

[Flomaster]

you don't consider your mash out water,your batch sparge water?

seems like you batch sparged to me

-=Jason=-

 

[danorocks17]

Bulldog, it is 13 lbs 7oz of grain, plus a pound of honey

you don't consider your mash out water,your batch sparge water?

seems like you batch sparged to me

-=Jason=-

I never considered it sparge. the first two times i did a mash out plus a sparge, but I was only doing about 1.25 qts per lbs.

 

[metalpysko]

Did u do anything different this time comsidering ur last ag batches

 

[danorocks17]

Did u do anything different this time comsidering ur last ag batches

the only thing i changed was water/grain ratio and then I mashed at a lower temp (152) that's about it

 

[metalpysko]

What was ur temp last time

 

[slothorentropy]

you don't consider your mash out water,your batch sparge water?

seems like you batch sparged to me

-=Jason=-

Yeah, this. If you had drained the tun prior to the mashout water addition (though I dunno why you would), you'd effectively be batch sparging. If you just did a bigass mashout temp liquor addition on top of your mash water and ran that out, it's like you did an extremely runny single step mash. Kind of hard to tell without some more details about your procedure.