So, I recently did Jamil Zainasheff’s hazelnut chocolate porter, using maris otter as the base malt. I batch sparged in a 70 qt coleman cooler and collected 6.5 gallons and collected 5 gallons after it was all said and done for the fermenter. The gravity reading was well above what the recipe stated. When I calculated the efficiency after, it was almost 82%. Is that too high? I’ve heard that too high of an efficiency can be a bad thing, as you may be extracting things from your mash that are undesirable.
82 is just dandy. The real trick is whether or not you can repeat it and if you picked up anything “off”. Odds are that you’re fine. I start looking askance at numbers above 85%
The real key is repeating it. 82 would be bad if the next time you made the recipe you got 52.
jinx! you owe me a beer.
Thanks for the responses!
Fine, come and get it ;D
Your efficiency appears fine. I’m typically at 78% to 82% for my system. I find that efficiency falls off when I have a significant percentage of wheat in the grist. I still don’t really understand why.
+1. When efficiency approaches 90%, that’s when the beer starts getting thin and watery in my experience. 82% is just fine, and in fact is pretty much my goal – high enough, but not too high.
Protein rest with the wheat? That should help it along.
I average 80-85%. Really like this range.
Dave
Well, this is crazy…I just got a German pils in the fermenter. 12 lb. Best pils, 1 lb. Best Munich, target OG 1.042. I got 10.5 gal. out of the mash at 1.044. Promash tells me that’s 99% efficiency. I got 8.5 gal. of 1.051 in the fermenter. Promash tells me 99% again. When I do it by hand I get about 87%, much more believable. I double checked all weights and measurements.
Denny, my data shows that for low gravity beers, efficiency approaches 100% if you are crushing enough, which clearly, you are. I figure that gravity points plus efficiency points are almost constant for any brewer. Example: My average homebrew has a gravity of about 1.059, and my average efficiency is currently about 84%, plus or minus. So my constant is 59 + 84 = 143. Then I can use that to back-calculate what efficiency to expect for a 1.042 beer. The result is 143 - 42 = 101%! And in reality, this is damn close to being correct. In reality I would likely get around 96% or something like that. So I’m not at all surprised by your 99%, knowing that you and I both routinely get efficiencies in the low 90s if we want to.
Now if your beer turns out thin, watery, and lifeless, this would help prove my other theory that high efficiency is not such a good thing. I currently purposely would open my grain mill to shoot for an efficiency in the 80s because this requires more grain to be used to hit the same gravity, which results in more flavors from “grainy stuff” in the final beer. More experiments are needed to confirm. If this isn’t the coolest experiment that’s never been run yet, then I don’t know what is.
Maybe promash doesn’t have the right malt analysis values, or is not handling the measured water volume properly? IIRC Best Munich/Pils have a moisture corrected extract yield of 80% by weight, so at 100% efficiency you would have .813lbs=10.4 lbs (4.72 kg) of extract in the kettle. You measured 1.044 (11 Brix) in 10.53.78 = 39.7L. The mass of the mash is given by SGVol = 1.04439.7 = 41.4 kg. 11% by weight is sugar, so .11*41.4=4.56 kg. Therefore the efficiency is 4.56/4.72 = 96.5%.
I don’t have my spreadsheet handy, but this seems within the realm of possibilty on a 1.044 beer, maybe just a touch high. Of course if the volume is off by a quart or if it is corrected to room temp, the effeciency would drop 3-4%. I’m guessing you were in the low 90’s on this batch.
My experience is the opposite. Mine goes through the roof when I have wheat in the grist. I have been trying to figure that one out.
If nothing else, you have a measurement error somewhere. Unless you left 0.6 gal in the kettle. 10.544 = 462 point-gal, 8.551 = 434 point-gal.
At any rate, it looks like your efficiency is in the low- to mid-90s, which isn’t unrealistic with such a small grist.
That’s just about right.
I have a related question I thought I could ask here instead of starting a new tread (don’t mean to hijack the thread).
I am currently trying to dial in my efficiency. I do partial mashing using quite a bit of grain vs extract (usually around 80/20). I mash in a 5 gallon igloo and batch sparge (using Denny’s method). My efficiency has been pretty up and down (swings of 10 to 20%). Some of this I attributed to the mill at my brew shop, which sucks. I bought my own mill which really helped on my first brew (jumped from 55% to 72%) but next brew was about 63%.
I can’t do full boils, right now I do 4 gallons (though I just got a bucket heater to get that up). My mill is set at about .035.
I would like to get about 70% and not so worried right now about getting better efficiency just trying to get it consistent.
Stating with my next brew I am going to track my boil off rate. Also I was’t accounting for mash tun dead space, which now I have fixed in my software. I use the same process every time and take as many notes as I can.
What are some other things I could be doing to help dial in my efficiency? Oh, I also check to make sure the malt I am using is nice and fresh.
Thanks!!
What kind of OGs are you brewing? That range is about right is there’s a large variation in gravity.
I am all over the board, love all sorts of beers. :) But most often 1.050 to 1.070 so mid range. Not worried about hitting 1.057 when I shoot for 1.060, I’ve been missing 10 or so points. For example I my last brew I shot for for 1.054 ended up at 1.045. Just trying to dialing it in. I did how ever found one of my big problems… the stick I use to measure water in my pot was almost 1/2 gallon off. I have been diluting my beer my 1/3 to 1/2 gallon. Fixed that tonight so I will see how it goes tomorrow when I brew. But still would love some more advice!
Batch sparging efficiency can be broken down into mash and lauter efficiency. Mash efficiency is affected by crush, grist yield, mash pH, time, temp, etc. Basically how much of the potential starch do you convert to sugar? Lauter efficiency is a measure of how much of this converted sugar you get out of the mash tun. This is affected batch-to-batch by how much water you mash/sparge with, and there are fixed losses associated with dead space and apparent grain absorbtion.
You can measure the mash efficiency by taking a gravity reading of the mash. This can be compared with the theoretical yield of the malt, preferably from a lot analysis of the malt you are using, a general analysis posted on the maltsters website, or a more general assumption (e.g. 2-row yields 36 p*gal/lb). This can be improved most easily by crushing finer, but ensuring all your mashing parameters are in the correct range (pH, temp, time) is important for consistency and getting max yield.
Lauter efficiency is correlated directly with how much water is used to mash. If you have 10 lbs of grain and mash/sparge with 10 gallons of water, you’ll have a higher efficiency than if you use the same amount of water with 15 lbs of grain. This is because the wort/sugar that is held back in the mashtun (by grain, dead space) is not as dilute, so you are effectively leaving more sugar behind. There’s not much we can do to improve this, because we typically have a fixed boil volume and don’t want to boil 15 gallons down to 5. So usually this effect is just accounted for, you’ll notice a decrease in efficiency with bigger beers.
Kai has several articles on batch sparging efficiency analysis if you want more info, or you can just ask if you have specific questions.
Wonder if you’d care to support your theory with a little chemistry…