msppilot
Well-Known Member
I am looking for ideas of how to increase my mash efficiency. I have two all-grain batches under my belt now and I have not hit my target O.G. on either. The first time I think the issue was too much water volume, which diluted the wort. The second batch I was more careful about the volume and was close to my target pre-boil volume, although I did not get the boil off I expected. I am pretty sure this had nothing to do with the low O.G. My target mash temperature was 154 degrees and I hit that temp at first but my mash temp did drop to about 147 about half way through the mash. I added about 1/2 gallon of almost boiling water and brought the mash temp back up and added 15 more minutes of mash time. One thing I noticed is my mash is not a consistent temperature throughout the mash tun. I did stir the mash a little during the mash to try and get a more consistent temp. The mash temp did never drop below 146 or 147 and also never was above 160. After 75 minutes of mashing, I performed the mash out, with aprox. 1/2 gal, I lowered the mash out volume because of adding the water to bring the mash temp back up. I then performed a vorlof and a batch sparge with aprox. 4 gallons. I took a pre-boil O.G. measurement with my refractometer and only measured 5 brix, which converted to aprox. 1.023. My target O.G. was 1.058 according to the recipe and 1.072 according to Beer Smith. Although, I am not 100% sure I had the exact same grains in Beer Smith as I actually used. Anyway, what I am trying to figure out is why I was so low on mt bre-boil O.G. I was able to add 2 lbs. of DME and that brought my post boil O.G. up to 15 brix, or 1.061. So I was able to save the brew but does anyone have any ideas on what I did wrong? Thanks for any advise.