jhutch31
Active Member
Hello everyone,
So I have been having issues with low efficiency. I posted about this a few days ago and received some great responses and direction as to how to approve my efficiency. It became evident that the amount of time I was sparging was way too fast. I totally agree, now that I know, I have made that change. However, I brewed again last night, and efficiency was the worst I have had to date.
As a recap, I have a brewmagic system from Sabco and I have been brewing 10 gal batches of all grain for my beer. I do a fly sparge for sparging.
Last night, I brewed another batch based upon employing the new things I had learned from this great forum. I purchased a refractometer and monitored my mash process until I hit my target O.G. dead on. It didn't take but about 30 mins to have the 1.057 that I had designed in BeerSmith2. Because I hit the target quickly, I went ahead and continued to mash for the full hour that Beersmith recommonded and then started my sparge.
This time, I sparged for an hour. I made sure to level the grain bed before sparging and used the hose that normally whirpools the wort to evenly distribute the water over the grain bed so it soaked through evenly. I kept the valve that transfers wort to the kettle barely open so that it trickled.
I immediately checked my gravity once the sparge finished and it was 1.035! I was shocked! At that point, I stopped everything and began studying the process again. One thing that stood out immediately is that I had 14 gallons of water in my boil kettle. I reviewed everything in beersmith and it was entered correctly, so I went ahead and tried fixing the gravity with DME. It required a ton of DME so I poured in what I had, boiled and finished the brew. Final gravity was 1.047 after adding a ton of DME. Total boil time was 75 minutes due to trying to get the water quantity down. realized I would be boiling for quite a few more hours so I gave up. Final quantity into the fermenter was around 12 gallons.
So, that got me thinking that the calcs in BeerSmith aren't making sense. I reviewed how it arrives at it's #'s and found some things that appeared to be skewing the calcs. It adds and extra gallon of water for Tun deadspace, it adds 14.9% more water for boil off during the hour of boil, it addes and extra gallon for trub loss, 4% loss for cooling and a gallon of loss for bottling.
Does this seem right? It appears that beersmith has you design your beer based upon the batch size you choose, (in this case 10 gallons) but then it provides water calcs based upon ending up with a bottling amount of ten gallons after you figure in all the loss due to trub loss in the fermenter, bottling, etc. Has anyone else found this to be the problem or does anyone understand or use beersmith enough that you can explain how to get the calculation of water volumes correct so that you end up with 10 gallons of boiled water at the end of the boil to match your design. It appears that that's my problem as I entered in the volume of what was in my boil kettle when finished boiling into beer smith and low and behold, 1.035 OG came up in the design. Should I use beersmith for helping me quickly design gravity #'s, IBU's, Alcohol Content, and then use the ole 1.5 quarts per lb of grain method for water? When I do that, it appears that the water volumes would be more correct. Sorry for the long explanation, but I wanted to be thorough.
Thanks!
John
So I have been having issues with low efficiency. I posted about this a few days ago and received some great responses and direction as to how to approve my efficiency. It became evident that the amount of time I was sparging was way too fast. I totally agree, now that I know, I have made that change. However, I brewed again last night, and efficiency was the worst I have had to date.
As a recap, I have a brewmagic system from Sabco and I have been brewing 10 gal batches of all grain for my beer. I do a fly sparge for sparging.
Last night, I brewed another batch based upon employing the new things I had learned from this great forum. I purchased a refractometer and monitored my mash process until I hit my target O.G. dead on. It didn't take but about 30 mins to have the 1.057 that I had designed in BeerSmith2. Because I hit the target quickly, I went ahead and continued to mash for the full hour that Beersmith recommonded and then started my sparge.
This time, I sparged for an hour. I made sure to level the grain bed before sparging and used the hose that normally whirpools the wort to evenly distribute the water over the grain bed so it soaked through evenly. I kept the valve that transfers wort to the kettle barely open so that it trickled.
I immediately checked my gravity once the sparge finished and it was 1.035! I was shocked! At that point, I stopped everything and began studying the process again. One thing that stood out immediately is that I had 14 gallons of water in my boil kettle. I reviewed everything in beersmith and it was entered correctly, so I went ahead and tried fixing the gravity with DME. It required a ton of DME so I poured in what I had, boiled and finished the brew. Final gravity was 1.047 after adding a ton of DME. Total boil time was 75 minutes due to trying to get the water quantity down. realized I would be boiling for quite a few more hours so I gave up. Final quantity into the fermenter was around 12 gallons.
So, that got me thinking that the calcs in BeerSmith aren't making sense. I reviewed how it arrives at it's #'s and found some things that appeared to be skewing the calcs. It adds and extra gallon of water for Tun deadspace, it adds 14.9% more water for boil off during the hour of boil, it addes and extra gallon for trub loss, 4% loss for cooling and a gallon of loss for bottling.
Does this seem right? It appears that beersmith has you design your beer based upon the batch size you choose, (in this case 10 gallons) but then it provides water calcs based upon ending up with a bottling amount of ten gallons after you figure in all the loss due to trub loss in the fermenter, bottling, etc. Has anyone else found this to be the problem or does anyone understand or use beersmith enough that you can explain how to get the calculation of water volumes correct so that you end up with 10 gallons of boiled water at the end of the boil to match your design. It appears that that's my problem as I entered in the volume of what was in my boil kettle when finished boiling into beer smith and low and behold, 1.035 OG came up in the design. Should I use beersmith for helping me quickly design gravity #'s, IBU's, Alcohol Content, and then use the ole 1.5 quarts per lb of grain method for water? When I do that, it appears that the water volumes would be more correct. Sorry for the long explanation, but I wanted to be thorough.
Thanks!
John
