Many folks around all these threads will mention what their efficiency is. I once remember hearing on a Brewstron episode that to truly measure your efficiency, you had to really know all your grains, and precicely measure your strike and sparge water volumes and such. I don’t remember the exact process.
Are folks really doing all that when they quote their efficency?
According to Beersmith, I usually het about 75%. But I don’t think it really all that accurate.
Comments?
I try to add as much info I know on base malts from the malt analysis. I do try measure my strike and sparge volume by the 1/4 gallon. I typically achieve 85% total brewhouse eff on my system and it is pretty consistent. Very rarely will my numbers vary from what Beersmith tells me I should end up at.
EDIT: I should add, I dont think its very important what your eff actually is, its more important to be consistent. If I were under 65% I’d look to improve, but otherwise, as long as I was consistent I wouldn’t care much what my eff actually is.
Agreed. The actual efficiency number isn’t terribly important. Getting to where your efficiency is consistent means that it’s also predictable. That becomes very important when you’re putting together your own recipes.
Oh, and in my case, yes I measure water and grain amounts very accurately but I use the ‘default’ numbers for the various grain parameters.
I agree with above. Below 70% and I would look to improve my process. I saved 20 minutes on my fly sparge by losing 5% of efficiency. It was worth the trade off going from 85%-80%. So long as your numbers are consistent and the beer tastes good, I wouldn’t care…
Dave
+1 This is my typical process and efficiency.
I am happy since recently I improved my brewhouse efficiency as figured in ProMash by around 8 points, up to ~79% - 80% for 1.060 - 1.075 OG beers (still working out the variation by OG), by treating my sparge water as well as my mash water, per Bru’n Water v1.12. I used to only treat the mash water. Of course YMMV depending on your starting water. And I plan to test my pre-boil wort pH from now on too, to shoot for Martin’s recommended 5.2 - 5.4 pH.
For a number of years I couldn’t figure out why I was sticking at a lower efficiency than many other brewers, even though I had followed the recommended efficiency improvement practices of crushing til I’m scared, balancing runoff volumes of my mash and batch sparge runoffs, keeping my mash thickness to no thicker than 1.5 qts water per lb. of grist if possible, hitting a sparge temp of between 164F - 169F. I assume you know the drill.
Although my beer has been good until this improvement, the efficiency jump hasn’t hurt beer quality, and the better efficiency lowers my cost per batch which means to me that it is important to improve processes that improve efficiency when those changes are just following new SOPs, if your system/schedule allows it.
5
I envy/miss that kind of consistency. I used to be dialed in - knew I was at about 78%. With BeerSmith, I could get my target OG almost dead on. Since we moved, I have started using Brun’n Water. Slightly better water and being more mindful of water chemistry has boosted me up to around 85%, but what is vexing me is the loss of consistency. My efficiency jumps around almost 10 points over the last half dozen or so batches. I’m thinking the culprit has to be the water chemistry, but what precisely it is, I can’t nail down. I just got 92% on my last batch, but I was planning for 83! I would gladly go back to 78 if I knew I could keep it!