Efficiency... Ugh

[bleme]

I need to wrap my head around the fact that even though your adding more sugar to a given volume your also adding much more water diluting the mix as a whole....yet raising the SG...I'm not computing that for some reason.

This is how I'm seeing it:

Add one teaspoon of salt to a gallon of water
Add one teaspoon of salt to 3 gallons of water, mix them together

Is the salinity greater now that you added them together...no

The difference is that you don't end up with more water. You are using the same amount of water, just splitting it into 2 batches. If you mash in 7 gallons, you might get 1.050 but if you mash in 5, you get 1.070 and the other 2 gets 1.030. Mixed together that is 1.0585.

 

[Homergah]

@JONNYROTTEN That book I quoted by Ray Daniels is a really good read. Chapter 6 alone was worth the price of the book to me. Such a commem sense approach to wort gravity. Even if you never use it, given the full volume mash of biab, it's still awesome to be equipped with such a basic, yet intricate tool.

 

[creekcaster]

Thanks for all the replies... Y'all have certainly given me plenty of things to think about!

I have some bad info entered in my equipment profile, i.e. kettle volume, trub loss etc., Which I think has impacted the calculated boil volume which is on the low side. So from the beginning it looks like I was mashed with1 gal less than I should. Also trub loss was set at .05 instead of .50.

Still my efficiency is low but when I adjusted my profile (created a new one!) It did improve.
I assume mashing a gallon short of water effected that too.
I'm gonna try the gift card trick... I really think I get a pretty good grind but gonna check still.

I'm gonna do the dry run as suggested as well. I really don't know how much I boil off, how much I lose with cooling... I've just always gone with the default and as I screwed around with numbers in BS... I see that it really does make an impact.

Thanks again for all the tips... I'll be tweaking and dialing

 

[RM-MN]

Thanks for all the replies... Y'all have certainly given me plenty of things to think about!

I have some bad info entered in my equipment profile, i.e. kettle volume, trub loss etc., Which I think has impacted the calculated boil volume which is on the low side. So from the beginning it looks like I was mashed with1 gal less than I should. Also trub loss was set at .05 instead of .50.

Still my efficiency is low but when I adjusted my profile (created a new one!) It did improve.
I assume mashing a gallon short of water effected that too.
I'm gonna try the gift card trick... I really think I get a pretty good grind but gonna check still.

I'm gonna do the dry run as suggested as well. I really don't know how much I boil off, how much I lose with cooling... I've just always gone with the default and as I screwed around with numbers in BS... I see that it really does make an impact.

Thanks again for all the tips... I'll be tweaking and dialing

At this point I wouldn't do a dry run. I'd brew a batch of beer and measure carefully the pre and post boil I got. When I finished I would know what the boil off was and I'd have a batch of beer too.

 

[balrog]

Agree. Brew a batch but make lots of good measurements. Iteratively you will approach settings for boil off, & grain absorption to use in your beersmith profile (tools options advanced is where absorption is I think)

 

[Oginme]

Agree. Brew a batch but make lots of good measurements. Iteratively you will approach settings for boil off, & grain absorption to use in your beersmith profile (tools options advanced is where absorption is I think)

Thirded, and be sure to capture as accurate volume readings on your starting water and trub loss to fine tune your grain absorption and loss to trub to round out the equipment profile.

 

[Soulshine2]

So I lurk a lot here and try to pick up on nuggets here and there. I've been home brewing regularly for about a year now... All grain BIAB.
I can't get decent efficiency, I always come up short on volume...am I boiling too long, is it my hydrometer, refractometer, do I just suck at conversion??!
Tonight I mashed 15lbs of grain, mashed in about 7.8 gal for about 1hr 20min. Boiled for about 1hr20min.
Pale malts with a pound of flaked rye... Getting an OG of 1.059... was looking for 1.068ish..... and I only get about 4.25 gal into the primary.
WTH am I doing wrong?!

you're not accounting for the losses of volume during your brew session.
I'm assuming youre brewing 5 gallon batches (just a default batch size for me) which is my norm as well. I have my strike and sparge water going in an 8 gallon kettle at capacity. As it heats , a small amount will evaporate. I KNOW I have 1 gallon of that is dead space ( under the spigot) so that leaves me with 7 gallons usable without tipping it . I keep a couple gallons of jugged water handy . Once I've run my mash with the heated strike water I add these 2 jugs back in to keep volume and heat while I mash/rest. That brings my water volume up to 9 gallons usable.
Now ,in the mash tun, the grist will absorb a set amount of water ,right? Keep that in mind. Now while you're mashing , besides what gets absorbed by grain ,more evaporates if you dont keep a closed lid. after you've mashed it goes to the kettle. you lose some due to evaporation again and if you use hoses and pumps , you'll see a small loss there too. Once in the boil kettle , more evaporation loss. You will experience a sort of loss of volume of a ballpark 1/2 gallon when you chill it , just simple expansion /contraction due to temperature . When you run that to the fermenter , you'll have the trub dead space loss, this time around a half gallon . After fermentation is done and you're racking to the bottling bucket you'll lose the trub,yeast cake volume once again. Whatever is left is what it is.
By the time I've run my brew day and all gravity numbers spot on or close , of the 9 gallons of water I've started with , usually I only have maybe a 1/2 gallon leftover at the end to end up with 5 or 6 gallons in the carboy.

 

[Soulshine2]

I use Beer Smith. Basically I put in the ingredients to get to the profile I want. I'm guessing my equipment profile is jacked up somewhere.

1-I mill my grain and I think I get a pretty good crush... 2 roller mill set to the finest crush
2-I mash in a bag, no sparge but i hang the bag and squeeze and let it drain. Mashed about 80 minutes
3- I boil pretty vigorously.. as mentioned I did for about 80 minutes. No boil over
4- I chill with an immersion chiller... Chilled to about 70F
5- I do compensate for temperatures when reading gravity.
6- probably 1/2 gallon left behind to avoid trub

I'm definitely going to reverse engineer and see if I can come up with the culprit(s).
I'm certain it's some input errors on my equipment profile.

I'm probably boiling too hard for too long losing too much volume... But it seems my SG would be higher if that were the case. The search continues...

Thx for the feedback y'all

I added numbers to your points so I can try helping you better.
1-what is the gap on your mill... put a feeler gauge in it and see what exactly it is. mine is at 0.030 . I started with 0.035 but I closed it up a little and see no issues , no stuck sparges. (Note- I also use a bazooka tube in my mash tun. gravity, no pumps,no chill plates, no hoses until I'm transferring to the fermenter)
2-I do not BIAB but your mash time looks ok if you're step mashing but the boil time looks long. 60 mins is plenty.
3-depending on your pre-boil gravity and your target OG is what should make you want to gently boil or vigorously boil. Lid or no lid would be a better option to combat for loss by evaporation.
4-so do i, how quickly can you get from boiling to 100*F? I can do mine in 15 minutes, and 30 minutes to 70*F ,using the garden hose and seasonal ground water temps.
5-good! so you're correctly reading your hydrometer. Is it calibrated? How often do you inspect it for cracks?
6- 1/2 gallon left behind...where? kettle or fermenter?

 

[Hwk-I-St8]

I need to wrap my head around the fact that even though your adding more sugar to a given volume your also adding much more water diluting the mix as a whole....yet raising the SG...I'm not computing that for some reason.

This is how I'm seeing it:

Add one teaspoon of salt to a gallon of water
Add one teaspoon of salt to 3 gallons of water, mix them together

Is the salinity greater now that you added them together...no

You're analogy isn't correct. If full-volume BIAB is adding 1 teaspoon of salt to one gallon, doing a batch sparge is like adding 3/4 of a teaspoon to half a gallon, then adding 3/8 of a teaspoon to half a gallon and blending them. With the first you have 1 tsp in a gallon, with the second, you have 1 1/8 tsp in a gallon. You're missing the fact that you don't use full volume in the initial mash.

Alternately, you could do what you're saying and mash full volume, then sparge with, say a gallon, then boil an extra hour (assuming a 1G/hour boil off) and you end up with the same volume of wort at a higher gravity.

 

[bracconiere]

I need to wrap my head around the fact that even though your adding more sugar to a given volume your also adding much more water diluting the mix as a whole....yet raising the SG...I'm not computing that for some reason.

This is how I'm seeing it:

Add one teaspoon of salt to a gallon of water
Add one teaspoon of salt to 3 gallons of water, mix them together

Is the salinity greater now that you added them together...no

if you boil it for an hour down to a half gallon it would be....

like sugar, salt has a higher boiling point then water, so it's distilling in reverse...