Post
by SteveD » Fri Mar 30, 2007 8:14 am
It's best to follow the advice given above which is about providing the best conditions for conversion, and making the sugars easily available for extraction. That's the best way to good efficiency. That way, when you do sparge, you'll get enough of the good stuff quickly enough.
Avoid the temptating to sparge and sparge and sparge. You'll run the risk of extracting 'nasties' as you leach out phenols and husky flavours towards the end. This is made worse as the PH of the wort will tend to rise towards the end, unless you've treated your sparge liquor to PH 5.5 or so. You'll also be diluting the wort too much, and thinning out the body of your beer.
You'll probably settle down to a narrow range of extraction efficiencies once you standardise your procedure and get used to your gear. Then you can just up the malt quantity to get what you want and not bother about hitting high efficiency values...you're beer will be better as a result.
I used to be hung up on high extraction efficiency but since I exorcised that demon, my beer has improved.
) are there any tips for maximising efficiency, what factors effect it? One thought i had was that i may have sparged (fly) too quickly, it didn't take very long (under 10 mins) to collect 10L (mini-mash) 
)