Adjusting for brewhouse efficiency

How do most people adjust for lower or higher efficiencies in a recipe? Do you just adjust the base grains or do you also adjust the specialty grains? Below are the more common reasons for different efficiency and it’s effect on the finished product and how to best compensate. Let me know your thoughts.

  • Crush: Different mill gap, your conversion will be effected. Since specialty grains are not effected by conversion there would be no need to adjust specialty grains just base grain.

  • Mashtun deadspace: This results in less run-off meaning more sparge water will be added to reach pre-boil volume, which then means watering down the final product. I would think this would mean to add more base grains for lost sugars and more specialty grains to compensate for lost flavor

  • Kettle or fermenter loss: This just effects the final volume so the choice here is to either produce less final product or increase all ingredients (including hops and water).

Does everyone agree with the above? If so, does this not make it quite difficult to adjust a recipe for efficiency? You’d also have to know why the recipe maker had a higher (or lower as the case may be) efficiency to properly adjust.

Maybe I’m over-analyzing a bit?

What a timely post… I just ordered NB’s Czech pils kit yesterday. Their anticipated OG for that kit is 1.047. I just went back through my brew log and I brewed this same kit 3 yrs ago and my OG came out at 1.059. But, even then, promash predicted an OG of 1.056 based on my usual 75% efficiency. My notes on that batch say it was good, but lacking a nice hop bitterness. Surprise.

If I bump the batch size up to 6 gallons, the anticipated OG should be 1.046. That’s what I think I’ll do instead of trying to remove grain from a pre-packaged kit. However, I’m going to do a 10 gallon batch and am wanting to do a 90 minute boil to get a little kettle carmelization… That’s going to call for a really full kettle. Hmmm. Might be better off pulling some grain out if that’s feasible.

Or I could just add more hops… Some many options…

Wouldn’t the easiest way be to just adjust the volume of grains? I’ve used BS2’s “scale recipe” function to do this a few times when I’ve brewed recipes that are designed for lower efficiency than mine.

Doing BIAB I get very high mash efficiency so I have my total efficiency in BS2 set to 80. I could probably push it higher as I still almost always get higher OG than predicted. If it take me out of style too far I usually adjust the grain bill next time I brew that recipe.

Scaling your grist bill for efficiency makes more sense to me than trying to mess with the crush. Some brewers will tell you that adjusting your grain bill too far for high efficiency will give you a watered down product, less body, etc. If your mash efficiency is high I don’t really see why it would but I’m sure there’s a point of diminishing returns so to speak.

[quote=“dannyboy58”]Wouldn’t the easiest way be to just adjust the volume of grains? I’ve used BS2’s “scale recipe” function to do this a few times when I’ve brewed recipes that are designed for lower efficiency than mine.

Doing BIAB I get very high mash efficiency so I have my total efficiency in BS2 set to 80. I could probably push it higher as I still almost always get higher OG than predicted. If it take me out of style too far I usually adjust the grain bill next time I brew that recipe.

Scaling your grist bill for efficiency makes more sense to me than trying to mess with the crush. Some brewers will tell you that adjusting your grain bill too far for high efficiency will give you a watered down product, less body, etc. If your mash efficiency is high I don’t really see why it would but I’m sure there’s a point of diminishing returns so to speak.[/quote]

You seem to misunderstand what i was saying. I was calling out the different possible causes for difference in efficiencies and how those effect the finished product and based on that decide what course of action to take.

In other words, if you know your lower efficiency is due to poor crush, just adding more base malt should do the trick, but if it’s due to mashtun deadspace, you’ll probably want to increase ALL grains equally.

Does that make sense? I was proposing it more as an idea up for debate than anything based on experience.

If I’m adjusting a recipe to fit my usual brewhouse efficiency, I adjust all the grains proportionally. As far as efficiency variance of my own brewhouse goes, it usually comes down the sparge. A nice, slow sparge always gives me good efficiency. If I rush it, as on a multiple batch day, my efficiency suffers for it. I’ve done batch sparging on my system a few times and my efficiency with that was all over the place. I know. Weird.

There was a thread last year related to this (at least some of the discussion was…) wherein a few thought that adjusting your grain bill DOWN to compensate for high efficiency may lead to/be the cause of more “watery” beers. …the rationale being there was more to a correct mash and resultant beer than just sugar/alcohol.

If that is the case, wouldn’t it be better to adjust your efficiency DOWN and maintain the “correct” grain bill/recipe?

I’m contemplating how to do that right now as I seem to be consistently blowing past target O.G.s…

That is my theory Chris. I have opened the gap on my grain mill twice now trying to dial my efficiency down out of fear for this potential effect.

You know, it makes sense that you would end up with watered down beer if you reduce your grain on a recipe to account for the fact that you have better efficiency than whoever wrote the recipe. But I’ve never seen any evidence of that happening. Maybe “flavor particles” are extracted from the grain in the same proportion as the sugars? You could make an argument that crush efficiency acts to expose each to the mash liquor equally, but to do that you have to ignore the fact that a lot of the flavors seem to be concentrated in the husk. Some day I’ll hear someone explain why this works the way it does.

mattnaik, I adjust all the grains proportionally. Seems to work well for me.

Increasing batch size or decreasing grain bill is basically doing the same thing as long as you decrease the grain proportionately. The truest way would be to try and lower your efficiancy by maybe doing your mash differently or your crush I suppose. Changing the crush is not an option for me as I get my grains crushed from the brew store. If you use kits it would be easiest to just add water. I’ve done both on the same recipe and to tell you the truth havnt noticed any difference.

Exactamundo. That’s the theory, anyway.

Exactamundo. That’s the theory, anyway.[/quote]
Which makes perfect sense, but for some reason I haven’t found that it works that way in practice. I have no idea why.

On the flip side, I have played around with parti-gyle brewing enough to say that flavors and richness of flavors are far more concentrated in the first runnings than just the sugar levels would suggest. You will get a far better second runnings beer if you blend even a small proportion of first runnings into it. I have to think that this is somehow related.

Have you been able to at all quantify the difference? Test a side-by-side set of brews with the same OG but using different amount of grain milled at different settings?

I once ran an experiment with a goal of different efficiencies, but alas, one of the two batches became contaminated so the experiment died.

I have had the same experience with partigyling though. Of course the first beer was excellent, but the second smaller beer needed supplemental malt to make it taste non-watery.

I have also made a great beer (Vienna lager) that scored well in competition, but the judges and I all agreed that the beer would have tasted even better if it wasn’t so danged watery. The flavors were all absolutely perfect, it just seemed too lifeless in body. On that batch my efficiency was 94%. I had already developed my theory before that point about the high efficiency problem, and for me, this result pretty well proved it.

I still want to run more experiments at some point… but I’m lazy so I’d kind of rather have others try it if they’re interested!!!

FWIW, I find around 70-75% produces the best tasting beer. I have done the whole same beer different % experiment. We went from 60-98% efficiencies. 60 was too malty and above 85 it started to get pretty thin. I have since targeted 70-72%(no sparge), and I find that makes the best tasting beers (for me).

I know Dave and I have talked about this as well.

I’m confused about the no sparge. Doesn’t sparging lower the gravity. I thought the maltyer beer you wanted the higher mash temp. And vise versa.

In no-sparge, you use enough strike water to compensate for the lack of sparge. So you are basically combining your strike and sparge water and just mashing with a higher volume of water.

In no-sparge, you use enough strike water to compensate for the lack of sparge. So you are basically combining your strike and sparge water and just mashing with a higher volume of water.[/quote]

Does it effect the final outcome. By the way I brewed the pilsner recipe you posted and I adjusted my grain down a pound for my higher efficiency than you had. I also adjusted the bittering addition to keep the AB/BU ratio the same. I guess we will see.