More grain vs improving efficiency

[dude1]

I made some tests with various amounts of grain for the same recipe and, not surprisingly, get very good results with big grain bills, especially in terms of body.

My question is: can you achieve this same result by improving your brewhouse efficiency or does a higher efficiency mostly increase the amount of alcohol without improving the body?

Thanks

 

[DurtyChemist]

A Higher brewhouse efficiency will get you more wort of the same gravity. You'll get more sugars into you boil kettle and your fermentor with higher efficiency. This means you'll have something like 6 gallons of 1.050 wort vs 1.045.

With more grain you're compensating for getting 65% brewhouse vs someone else getting 75% brewhouse.

 

[Dcpcooks]

Body of the beer isn’t really related to efficiency. That’s more mash profile and grain bill.

As the DurtyChemist said efficiency is related to how much of the potential sugars actually made it into the finished beer. I’m not concerned with the actual number as much as I’m concerned about repeatability of my recipes.

Efficiency is potential extract minus actual extract minus system losses.

 

[Smellyglove]

I made some tests with various amounts of grain for the same recipe and, not surprisingly, get very good results with big grain bills, especially in terms of body.

My question is: can you achieve this same result by improving your brewhouse efficiency or does a higher efficiency mostly increase the amount of alcohol without improving the body?

Thanks

I might be dumb since there's two answers to your post already which doesn't include " I'm not sure what you mean"...

I'm not sure what you mean. Did you do some tests withe the same grist compostition, but you just bumped the total weight, keeping the composition the same?

Since you're mentioning higher efficiency I guess that Im looking at your question the wrong way.

 

[BrianDorry55]

Lots of people around here smarter than me...but I would think if you're consistently getting lower efficiency, then you probably aren't getting everything out of your grain that is has to offer...which means you might not be getting the full character of the grain and thus might not get the beer you're looking for even by upping your grain bill and hitting your OG.

I struggled with efficiency early on and made a few easy changes...I believe my biggest issue was a crappy unreliable thermometer. So I bought a nicer one for like $20 and have been consistently around 70% efficiency since then, which I'm satisfied with considering my system.

 

[dude1]

Thanks for your answers.

Yes, I just beefed up the amount of grain with the same recipe.
I will definitely try to be as precise as possible with mash temp and also adjust my grain bills compositions.

And, yeah, at the end of the day, reproductibility is premium.

 

[dmtaylor]

I made some tests with various amounts of grain for the same recipe and, not surprisingly, get very good results with big grain bills, especially in terms of body.

My question is: can you achieve this same result by improving your brewhouse efficiency or does a higher efficiency mostly increase the amount of alcohol without improving the body?

Fantastic question! Answer is, I don't know. I myself have run efficiency experiments, but they have been inconclusive. More experiments will be needed for this one.

If anyone hasn't run their own experiments, then I dunno if I believe anything they say about this.

 

[jalc6927]

Efficiency is not as important as consistency especially for 5-10 gallon brews

It's really irrelevant when you consider the factors

Focus on making good beer