First all grain wheat beer 02/06/2007 (several pics)

[Exextractor]

Garth wrote:-

you can improve the insulation (or add if it's got none) in the lid by drilling a few holes in the underside and squirting expanding foam in, you may have to do it a few times to fill the lid and it may slightly mis-shape the lid but it will still fit

I was thinking of doing this as well, where do you get the foam? What is it called?

Thanks,
Exe

[SteveD]

Daab - I thought you were heading in the 'low efficiency - better beer' direction?

As I fly sparge I go for maximum pre-boil efficiency so I can keep the good stuff and afford to discard the low gravity runnings towards the end.

Ahh ok, not quite the same thing then. I'm tending to use more malt than the recipe calls for, extracting the good stuff, and discarding the surplus sugars.

[retourrbx]

Looking at efficiency calculation, I work it out like this - first time so I'm not sure if it is right

potential extract = quantity x (figure from above table)/final volume of beer

Potential extract from

pale malt = 2x300/22 - 27.3

Wheat malt and oats = 2.6x279/22 - 33.0

27.3+ 33.0 = 60.3 potential degrees of gravity

Because I only got 41, I divide this by the 60.3 to get the ratio of 0.68

Therefore the efficiency is 68%

What do you think - is this right?

[Frothy]

That's spot on. I reguarly get 65% efficiency on all my brews and I've done about 15 now of course there are different figures about for the potential grain extract & many people calculate "brewhouse efficiency" which means allowing a bit for loss in the hops, pipework etc. I've found a great increase in efficiency by putting the spent hops in a seive and rinsing them with a pint of boiling water... there was a lot of wort left in them.

i.e. HWE states
pale malt 317 P/kg/L
wheat malt 309 P/kg/L

Frothy

[retourrbx]

Never thought of that - I'll give it a go

[retourrbx]

I see - and mine is referring to the mash efficiency... no... hang on a minute... yes... in books do they generally refer to overall efficiency rather than mash efficiency

[SteveD]

Put simply, to calculate extraction efficiency (mash efficiency, if you like) the gravity and volume figures you use are pre-boil, ie take the readings when you've finished running off into the boiler. To calculate brewhouse (overall) efficiency, the gravity and volume figures are those in the fermenter.

Things to remember:-

(1) High efficiency does not make better beer

(2) However, it's worth learning how to get high efficiency - by using sound brewing technique, good ingredients, and well designed equipment.

(3)Then, once you can routinely achieve high efficiency, you can consciously lower it by using more malt and not extracting so thoroughly. This way beer quality goes up through only using the best runnings of the malt and avoiding the possibility of extracting undesirable substances through over sparging and rising PH

As David Edge put it, the beer of someone who who gets 90% efficiency will be no better than that of someone struggles to achieve 65%. BUT, the beer deliberately got at 65% by someone who CAN get 90% will be better than that of the 65% struggler.

[retourrbx]

I'm liking that thinking a lot...