White Wheat vs Red Wheat & Efficiency

I normally use white wheat malt or flaked wheat when brewing a wheat beer. Last weekend I decided to give red wheat malt a try. I had a 10% drop in efficiency (75% vs 85%). Is this consistent with results others have had using red wheat malt?

I also brewed a red wheat last weekend for the first time! Great minds must work alike, or words to that effect… :smiley:

The recipe was a Three Floyd’s Gumballhead clone (in which 40% of the grist was red wheat) and I saw no change in efficiency, which is typically ~79% for my system. Not sure how many types of red wheat there are floating around out there, but I purchased mine from our host.

[quote=“Dan S”]
The recipe was a Three Floyd’s Gumballhead clone (in which 40% of the grist was red wheat) and I saw no change in efficiency, which is typically ~79% for my system. Not sure how many types of red wheat there are floating around out there, but I purchased mine from our host.[/quote]
Looks like we were both using Rahr then. I’ve read elsewhere that a lot of people have a drop in efficiency with wheat, but I didn’t think much of it since I had not experienced it. It does seem like the red wheat kernels are a bit harder than white, so maybe that’s a factor.

I’ve recently gone to milling my grains by hand using a Barley Crusher (I seem to get better clarity this way, but maybe it’s just me), and can attest to the relative hardness of the red wheat – every turn of the handle was noticeably more difficult as it was going through.

I can’t imagine milling the wheat by hand. I milled the barley and wheat separately in my MM2, and I had to turn up juice on my low speed drill when milling the wheat.

Probably just a matter of the crush affecting efficiency. I think red and white wheat are only different in a few color genes, unless one is spring and one is winter wheat in which case there might be slightly more protein (in spring wheat I think).

There’s no reason that you would have less efficiency with wheat unless the additional beta-glucan content and lack of husk means you are getting poor lauter performance. Rahr gives typical analyses for both red and white wheat to the same specs, so unless your batch of wheat was radically off-base, there shouldn’t be a difference between the two. Usually wheat extract is higher than barley extract, but again, the brewhouse inefficiencies of your system may be causing problems.