I did a little efficiency experiment I wanted to share.
I brewed 11gallons of pilsner using 22# of Avangard pilsner malt: single infusion, batch sparge with mash out. My OG came in at 1.057.
I brewed again, wanting to lower my OG a bit and reduced the grain bill to 20#. I used the same mash schedule and water profile and volumes. The difference in pH was only .04. The second brew also clocked in at 1.057 plus an extra 2 liters of second runnings for a starter.
The only difference was I crushed malt for the second grain bill finer. I know this is nothing new and no doubt many have had similar experiences but I thought it was cool and wanted to share.
Crush till you’re scared. Then when you achieve >90% efficiency and your resulting beer tastes thin and watery and lifeless, you’ll open the gap on your mill, maybe even more than once, to get back down to around 80% for a better balance of good efficiency vs. mouthfeel.
I normally get around 72% efficiency and I’m content with that. This was my first time using Avangard malt and it seemed to give a better yield than I normally expect. The batch that resulted in better efficiency (81%) was double crushed, first coarse and then I closed the gap and crushed fine which leaves the husks more or less intact. I have an old Valley Mill which has indexed gap settings so I can change the gap in ~1 second.
Another one - I get consistently better efficiency using Avangard pils. My OG is .004-.005 higher using it.
i normally avg about 85% efficiency. today with 92% avangard vienna and 8% carared, i hit 90%!
Good malt with good extraction !
That’s an oldie, but goodie! I remember the JSP Mill/Valley Mill wars.
Better efficiency? Or just higher potential extract? Continental malts tend to have bigger kernels than domestic varieties IME.
This thread highlights a reason why efficiency is a less than optimal metric, at least how home brewers use it. A brew house should not automatically become more efficient when a higher yielding malt is used. In reality, real efficiency more than likely remains the same. What happens more often than not is that the maximum yield table has incorrect data for the malt being used, which is why I avoid using or relying on the metric.
In this case, with all elements between the two batches being the same, including the malt for both batches coming from the same sack, and except one batch having 2# less grain and a much finer crush, I think it’s safe to say it was better efficiency. Avangard seems to give a better yield than other German malts I’ve used but I don’t have any solid data to back it up. This wasn’t an intentional experiment per se, but I feel my process was scientific enough to consider my observation conclusive in this case.
Yeah, I didn’t take the OG bump with these malts as better efficiency (wrong terminology on my part), because my system is very consistent, efficiency wise. I had read accounts of the Avangard malts having higher potential extract and just took it as that. After using them 2 or 3 times with the same OG bump I just account for it now in recipe formulation.
That mill has served me well for a long time. Last year it began to stall repeatedly in mid crush and I almost replaced it, but I dismantled it and refurbished it and it’s as good as new. Ready for another decade or two of service!
I agree completely, and should have quoted someone else to make it clear I wasn’t questioning your conclusion.
Hmm? Given my experience with really high efficiency for the past year, you may have something there, Dave. While my beer hasn’t become thin, watery, or lifeless, I can’t say that it tastes better than it used to.
While I agree that the degree of crush has an influence on efficiency, the other factor is duration of runoff and sparging. I’m just not sure that backing off on the gap and resulting crush is necessarily going to improve my results.
As a data point, my last several batches have used a revised sparging scheme where I reserve about 1 to 2 gallons of the sparging water volume and DON’T put that volume through the grain bed. That volume goes directly into the kettle. Now, I’ve been doing this to avoid oversparging and extracting tannins. But the other effect is that the beers have higher taste quality and the efficiency did go down a little bit.
I’ll concede that high efficiency is not necessarily a good thing for beer quality. But I do want to hear more from other brewers on the effect of ‘excessive’ efficiency since I think that there is such a thing…now.
FWIW, I hit a pretty steady 80% on average strength beers and haven’t felt the need to try to go a lot higher, truthfully. I had read similar accounts to Dave’s and didn’t want to chance making beer I like less. I like my results.
Martin, you know I love ya, man, but I’ve gotta say it again…you’re not considering batch sparging here. Increasing the duration of runoff and sparge has never shown me any difference in efficiency.
someone will have to explain efficiency and correlation to good or bad beer…i don’t understand at all.
mid 80’2 is my norm, and not trying for any higher, albeit it does happen with some malts like avangard.
Martin,
I had experienced a steady increase in brewhouse efficiency over the course of a few years with more experience, harder crush, collection of every single drop of sparge volume, etc., until I was averaging about 90-92% efficiency. At that time, I began to notice that while my grist mass was shrinking, my malt flavors were also seeming to shrink. This was confirmed for me when I submitted an awesome Vienna later to a BJCP competition. I thought the beer was thin myself, but had excellent flavors, a really fine example of the style, the only exception being the thinness / not quite enough maltiness to make it superb. If memory serves, it scored around 38 and medaled, with the only real detrimental comment from the judges that it seemed kind of thin and could use more malt character. I got 94% efficiency on that particular batch. After that I decided to open the gap on my mill, bringing my overall efficiency down to about 88%. After several years there, still not good enough. I want to shoot for about 80%. So on my last batch I opened the gap even more.
I appreciate your idea about skipping part of the sparge and adding water directly to the kettle. I have also done this myself on some batches. Actually I tend to reserve this for the lower gravity beers, less than perhaps 1.050 original gravity, where I am essentially just doing no-sparge and rather than adding the full volume of the water in one big batch to the mash tun, I am instead just mashing as normal at a ratio of perhaps 1.5 qts/lb, running this off and then adding all the rest of my pre-boil volume directly to the kettle with no contact with the grains at all. This serves to bring my efficiency way down and malt flavors way up. This is successful. I have made good smaller beers in this manner, and I will continue to use this method.
Interesting. Yes, today we are getting to the point of folks realizing that high efficiency is simply just not all that wonderful. There can be disadvantages. However, more experiments will be necessary to flesh out these theories and turn them into facts. I will happily consume all said experiments that are run in my own home. 
I’m not sure there really is the correlation that some people seem to find. I’ve never seen any experiements or testing of it. But the theory, AFAIK, goes that with lower efficiency you get more of the “good stuff” out of the mash and with higher efficiency you get more 'less good stuff". I guess someone should inform Sierra Nevada and other breweries that get pretty much 100% efficiency that their beers aren’t any good.
Pretty good point.