100% efficiency? what?

Mashing
1

So i made a few batches in the coolers and wasn’t really liking the process. I ended up picking up a blichman boilermaker and mash screen for xmas.

I made NB’s All grain CREAM ALE.

I mashed with 3 gallon, Sparged with 5.2 gallon, and ended up with a boil volume of 6.5(approximate from the volume guage).

After my 1 hour boil i had 5.5 gallons left.

I chilled it down and checked the OG and it was 1.06!!! that would mean i got 100% efficiency. How is this possible???

I did att 16OZ honey during the last 5 minutes of the boil but that should only have added 5 points to my OG. I incorporated that in to my calculation and thats how I came up with 100% efficiency.

My main concern is coming in so high on future beers using this boilermaker and mash screen. What did I do wrong here or are these pots that good?

2

You must have been in " the beer zone "
Was everything around you happening slowly like in the Matrix?

3

Unlikely. Maybe your volume is off, or NB included an extra pound of grain, or you didn’t get the wort completely mixed after adding the honey. Honey would add close to 7pts for 5.5gal wouldn’t it? 36ppg like LME?

Its still quite possible that you got 90% efficiency.

4

I weighed and crushed my own grains. I did a pretty small crush because of how well the boilmaker mash screen works. So i know it was pretty dead on other than maybe an extra .2 lb of 2 row.

my volumes were dead on. there is a nice site gauge and i hand measures my sparge water and my final boiled volume.

i am assuming i did something wrong… maybe the honey needed more than 3 minutes in the boil to dissolve properly… i dunno… i just can’t figure how i ended up with such high OG. i assumed it would be around 1.045 with the honey instead of 1.06.

5

Did you draw your gravity sample off the bottom of the kettle through a spigot? if so, and the honey was not totally mixed into the wort, the fact that it is dense could cause it to sink and get a disproportionate amount in your sample.

6

after chilling for 25 minutes with chiller i just set then hydrometer right in the boil kettle and took a reading there.

7

im just going ton assume i got a bad gravity reading from the boil kettle after chilling… no other explanation i can think of. i am happy to see I am getting such high efficiency with my new blichmann boilermaker through. very happy with the performance of the mash screen.

8

Those do look like the Cadillac of kettles. Revive this thread later on and let us know what your next few batches show for efficiency. I suppose theres no dead space in the system with that kind of recovery.

9

I know the honey I used last had a PPG of 41, which would add 1.0075 to your OG. It was the 2012 crop of NB Wildflower honey.

Either way with such a small grain bill it is very possible to hit the 90-95% range, which would put you in 1.058-1.060 territory with the honey addition

10

Correct there was no dead space or water loss anywhere during the process which was kind of cool. My volumes were dead on.

My next batch is in a couple weeks. I’ll report back.

The blichmann Boilmaker is one sweet piece of equipment i must add as well.

11

I’m thinking your volume measurements are off. If there’s no dead space in the tun, the 8 lb grist would have absorbed right around 1 gal, leaving you with 7.2 gal in the kettle. That would still only be 91% lauter efficiency though.

Without accurate volume (and SG) measurements you won’t be able to get an accurate estimate of efficiency.