Efficiency

[GrayingNeophyte]

Good day to you fellow brewers.
In my quest to learn something new every day, I reach out to you for help in understanding and measuring brewing EFFICIENCY. I've seen a lot of references to low efficiency as an undesirable circumstance, but from a beer brewing standpoint, what exactly does it entail?
Thank you very much for your help and your patience with us neophytes, particularly the grayed ones, such as myself.
Cheers

 

[Sourz4life]

So there are two types of efficiency commonly mentioned in brewing. Mash and Brewhouse. As a home brewer to be honest you will only have to worry usually about mash efficiency. So what is is is basically how much sugar you've converted to simple sugars from complex and how well you were to strip those off of the grains(usually during a whirlpool or sparge). The 3 biggest things that usually play into mash efficiency is how well the grains were milled, mash PH, and temp. There are other factors as well but those are the big 3 to get used to. So if you get a software like beersmith it'll help explain it a bit. If you do some searching around here and other beer info websites it'll explain it in much further detail. When I first started doing all grain I would use iodine to ensure that all the sugars were converted before bringing it up to mash out temps. http://beersmith.com/blog/2014/11/0...vs-mash-efficiency-in-all-grain-beer-brewing/ some good info on it.

 

[GrayingNeophyte]

Thank you very much for the guidance. It gives me a heads up on what I need to focus to better grasp the concept and add it to my brewing day logs.
I have been doing an iodine solution test, but only as an observational step to see if sugar conversion had been completed, just didn't know how to use that info with a couple more measures to obtain a quantifiable result.
More learning to come, indeed.
Cheers.

 

[RM-MN]

On the homebrew level efficiency is more of a measure of your ability and the quality of the milling of the grain. If your efficiency is low you can compensate by adding a little more base malt or malt extract and it won't affect the cost of your brew by very much. Some people will claim that lower efficiency will get you a better tasting beer.

Now if you were making beer to sell, lower efficiency would mean a higher cost of materials and that could make you uncompetitive in the market.