Big Beer Efficiency

[mykafone]

What is the trick to keeping up your Efficiency on big beers. I tried my biggest beer yet this weekend and hit about 60% Efficiency. I usually nail my gravity at about 75% Efficiency.

When it came time to sparge I only used about 1.5 gallons of sparge water because of all the water used in mash in and mash out, so when sparge was done the beer was still running strong..

Do I just sparge more and boil the hell outta it?? Lower grain to water ratio?? Skip mash out??? Or adjust amout of grain I use to for 60% Efficiency ???

[seanhagerty]

Sparge more and boil more. Also, lower your mash ratio, I skip the mash out too. Also, do the naked goat dance during the sparge, for some reason that helps.

Sean

[Kaiser]

yes, sparge more. The more you sparge, the better your efficiency . But the bigger the beer the more sparge you would need in order to keep your efficiency at the normal level. Obviously there is a limit to the amount of sparing you can and want to do. Thus your efficiency has to suffer.

Kai

[mykafone]

is there some sort of magic number or magic ratio or magic rule of thumb that helps this?? for example - more sparge water than mash water or equal mash and sparge water

[Triple Freak]

The more you sparge, the more you risk extracting tannins.
I usually add 4-5 lbs of grain to make up for the loss of efficiency.
Grain is cheap, tannins are forever.

[Kaiser]

I'd say determine the pre-boil volume that you want to have. This will be a function of the time you are willing to boil or the volume of the boil kettle (the latter is true for me and my turkey frier system). Then you can make up for the efficiency loss with more grain or DME. I adjust the grain until my mash gets to thick, then I use DME to get the gravity even higher.

Kai

[mykafone]

Has anyone charted out efficency loss due to higher a OG. Since I screwed the pooch on my last smoked porter - im going to do 2 big beers back to back. my first is an IPA at 1.073 and then a russian imperial stout at 1.100 - - it would be nice to be able to guess my effiecency now - before i order grain.

like i said earlier I normally hit 75% - on my last batch i hit 60% but now i am going to skip the mashout and lower my grain to water ratio.. but what kind of curve am i looking at here??????

[bperetto]

Has anyone charted out efficency loss due to higher a OG.

Yes, I'm that geeky. Plus I have a lot (LOT) of free time at work.

I went through all of my past brew notes and charted the OG and actual Efficiency and then graphed it. It looks like a big X