rpolzin25
Well-Known Member
So I am fairly new to brewing (just started a year ago) and even newer to all grain brewing (only 4 all grain brews). I am a big lover of wheat beers so I have mostly been brewing wheat beers (3 of my 4 all grain were wheats). I thought I had been getting about 68-70% efficiency with my brews as I had been hitting that with every brew up until my latest brew which was a dunkelweizen. When I went to take my gravity reading I was significantly lower than I expected (1.042 vs 1.052). I was only off on my water level by maybe a quart so it wasn't a dilution issue. Considering I was much lower than I wanted to be I added a 1 lb of honey to bring up the sp gravity (brought it up to 1.048) so I was at least happier w/ the final gravity. Then it hit me, I remembered reading in these forums that wheat beers can have lower efficiency. All my wheat beers to this point I had actually used honey which I am assuming inflated my perceived efficiency. The only non-wheat beer I did was the Oktoberfast recipe here on the forums and I hit 70% efficiency right on the nose which of course had no wheat malt in it. So it appears that my efficiency (based on this last brew) is that I am at about 58-60% efficiency w/ wheat beers)
So please correct me if I am having illogical thinking but I am guessing that I am getting about 50% efficiency out of wheat malts and 70% efficiency out of nonwheat malts. Assuming this that would get me my 58-60% efficiency on wheat beers since roughly half my grain bill is wheat.
With the difference in designing my recipes for wheat beers how do I go about designing them? The grain bill on my last recipe was as follows:
6 lbs wheat malt (56.5%)
2 lbs 2 row (18.8%)
1.5 lbs munich (14.1%)
12 oz honey malt (7.1%)
6 oz midnight wheat (3.5%)
So when designing the recipe would I be best off designing the recipe with with the different efficiencies in mind? So when I design my wheat beers, should I design it using the 70% efficiency and then once I have the ingredients where I want them, drop the efficiency in the calculator to 60%, and then add only to the wheat amount to get the sp gr up to where I was at with the 70% calculation? To me this would make sense because because even though I am increasing the wheat my efficiency is worse on the wheat so I would still be getting a similar % of wheat instead of increasing all the ingredients. So although I might be increasing the wheat by 1.5 lbs it would still be the same final % of wheat sugars in the final product. I really apologize if this is a confusing question but I don't know how else to word it. Thanks
So please correct me if I am having illogical thinking but I am guessing that I am getting about 50% efficiency out of wheat malts and 70% efficiency out of nonwheat malts. Assuming this that would get me my 58-60% efficiency on wheat beers since roughly half my grain bill is wheat.
With the difference in designing my recipes for wheat beers how do I go about designing them? The grain bill on my last recipe was as follows:
6 lbs wheat malt (56.5%)
2 lbs 2 row (18.8%)
1.5 lbs munich (14.1%)
12 oz honey malt (7.1%)
6 oz midnight wheat (3.5%)
So when designing the recipe would I be best off designing the recipe with with the different efficiencies in mind? So when I design my wheat beers, should I design it using the 70% efficiency and then once I have the ingredients where I want them, drop the efficiency in the calculator to 60%, and then add only to the wheat amount to get the sp gr up to where I was at with the 70% calculation? To me this would make sense because because even though I am increasing the wheat my efficiency is worse on the wheat so I would still be getting a similar % of wheat instead of increasing all the ingredients. So although I might be increasing the wheat by 1.5 lbs it would still be the same final % of wheat sugars in the final product. I really apologize if this is a confusing question but I don't know how else to word it. Thanks
