Any ideas? Have changed nothing about my method AT ALL.




2.5L in 23.5L is over 10%, which is significant . . . but do you not normally take this into account with your calculations? 1L that didn't make it into the boiler I'm assuming will be about 85% of the gravity of the post boil gravity, so the equivalent of having about 0.85L missing from the FV (assuming a constant trub / hop wort loss).floydmeddler wrote:Well,
I mashed in with no dough balls and it maintained at a steady 67c for 90 mins. I then batch sparged. The gravity of the very final runnings was 1020. I didn't take a preboil gravity reading.![]()
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Although I collected 23.5L in the fermenter, I didn't take into account the 1L extra that didn't make it to the boiler and the 2.5L that was left behind in the boiler due to hops and trubs. Don't know if this makes a difference. Efficiency CONFUSES me.![]()
Wish I had have taken a preboil reading then I would at least know my grain efficiency.
So, I've got a 4.4% Belgian Pale Ale. How embarrasing. Might add some sugar.
Hi. Here's the thread I did on it:pantsmachine wrote:Glad you are getting towards a result. Interested about your Heather ale. Did you go picking?
Yup! That is right. Part of the excitement is the 'not knowing how it'll all turn out' thing. I'm going to buy some PH strips and concentrate on that for my next brew. This current brew is doing OK now actually. I added 500g of homemade Belgian Candi Sugar which upped the alcohol content a bit so I'm now in the correct range for this style.Barley Water wrote:Just a few ideas for you:
The first thing I would look at is the grind. Especially if you get your grains ground by the supplier, they may have changed something without you being aware of it. For instance, if you use 6 row malt (or wheat malt) your efficiency will go to hell unless you make some adjustments (of course don't go too far as I did in my last brew session and get slow runoff). If you grid you own, check out the gap on the rollers, maybe they came loose somewhere along the way giving you a lousey crush.
The next thing has to do with the pH of the mash. If you have water that is slightly alkaline, the pale lager malt can not over come that and your mash ph tends to be too high messing up your efficiency. If you notice you do better when making darker beers that may be part of the issue. I have this situation so I always use the Acid 5.2 stuff (which is a buffer) therefore I don't need to worry about that and can concentrate of screwing something else up.
Finally, if you fly sparge and for whatever reason you get channeling, your efficiency can drop like a bomb. I highly recommend batch sparging which of course has been discussed on this forum ad nausum. Long story short, you don't need to worry about channeling if you batch sparge and it's easier to keep the pH in the right range while running off therefore avoiding the extraction of unwanted tannins.
I guess at the end of the day though, since we are dealing with grains produced by nature, we should expect some variation. If everything went perfectly every time, things would get boring, right?