OK, it means I almost certainly made an error in weighing out my grain. I just hope the error was in the base Pils malt, and not some astronomical error in the specialty malts. The beer is a Dubbel, and I knew before the boil that I was way over target gravity. I ended up diluting with an extra gallon pre-boil, and increasing my hops accordingly. Still, my target was 5 gallons at 1.069, and now I have 6 gallons at 1.073. I generally get pretty high efficiency, 85% or higher, but every now and again I get a batch near 100%, but never this high before. I just wish there were a way I could recheck my grain amounts. But I’m not complaining about extra beer!
(And just for the record, I am aware that it is possible to legitimately get greater than 100% efficiency. The highest I’ve ever heard of was the near 130% claim by DeKonick, in Antwerp. They grind their grain to powder, and use a high pressure filter to lauter. That’s also why they have to filter the beer so much before it goes out the door.)
Are you reading your malt spec sheets, or are you just using homebrewing software. Homebrewing software has a good average number, but you could have an especially rich batch of malt on your hands as well. The only true way to determine efficiency is to get the malt spec sheets. For most homebrewing purposes this doesn’t always make that big a difference, but I hear on the pro level it makes a tremendous difference.
That said, it seems like you figured out the cause of your problem.
Not to change the subject, but the title of this post reminds me of one of the early Simpsons episodes where Homer is in a tank of water and the doctor says “this isn’t right, this man is 104% body fat” because Homer is eating a turkey leg. “Hey, no eating in the tank.” Sorry, nothing more of value to add!
It doesn’t matter what your volume of wort is when you start the boil, your “efficiency” is still the same, even if you boil it down to a syrup. Now if you’re saying that you sparge more to collect more sugar and then boil that down, then yes, your efficiency will increase a little.
But the fact that you’re boiling for 120 minutes has nothing to do with the efficiency. The greater efficiency comes from the fact that you have to sparge more in order to get enough pre-boil volume to still end up with 5 gallons post-boil.
Tubercle always thought efficiency was the ratio between the total available sugar in the malt vs. the amount actually extracted and had nothing to do with what gravity the wert ends up being.
The post boil gravity takes into consideration Pre-boil gravity, evaporation, etc and that is where the grain bill is configured at a predicted efficency of extraction.
Maybe I should repeat myself??? Boiling doesn’t change efficiency, because sugars are conserved… ;D
The extracted amount of sugar does not change. Now if one COLLECTS more volume then they can potentially extract more sugars, but it has NOTHING to do with the boil.
I often leave behind a lot of sugars in the mash (which I sparge a little more to freeze for starters, but that’s a different story), which I think is what fred is getting after.
for example, I generally collect 14gal for a 12gal batch, losing 1.5gal to evaporation over a 90min boil and .5gal to hop absorption and dead space to get 12 in the fermentor.
For an average 1.065 batch of beer, I generally acheive 77% efficiency in collecting my 14gal, but can collect about 3qts of 1.025 starter wort with another sparge while the boil is going on.
if I sparged another 1.5gal through the mash grain bed, I could get another 1.5gal of 1.025ish gravity beer for 15.5 gal but then I would need to boil longer to get down to my batch volume, in this case 3 hours total of boiling given my boiloff rate.
There would be a little more sugar in the wort at this point since I collected more sugars.
However, I think this is retarded since to save a few $2 in grain by being more efficient I wasted $5 in propane and polluted more as well.
Yea but I like the flavor impact a long boil has on my BWs and Wee Heavys. It is a secondary effect to increase efficiency utilizing a long boil, the efficiency increases because I have to increase my wort collection to compensate for the evaporation losses of a long boil. Thus my efficiency increases because choose to alter my brewing procedures by performing a long boil (and the need to collect more wort to allow it).
I know - I should have put a smiley after the last sentence - I know there are other purposes, it just seems oxymoronic to put the words more efficient in the same context as boiling longer.
