Efficiency

[thedude00]

How do you find of your Efficiency ???

[ajdelange]

If the question is "How does one calculate efficiency?" the answer for home brewers is usually to consult a table in a book that tells one how many "points per pound per gallon" a particular grain should yield, add up all the "point pounds" for each of the grains and divide by the number of gallons. This gives the number of points a 100% efficient brew would contain. For example: 10 pounds of grain yielding 38 ppppg with 5 pounds of grain yielding 30 gives 380 + 190 = 570 points. In 10 gallons of this would give 57 points and the wort should have SG 1.057. If it has SG 1.050 then the efficiency is 100*50/57 %.

There are lots of problems with doing it this way but it is accurate enough for most home brewers.

If the quetion really is "How do you find your Efficiency?" the answer is that I measure the alcohol content of the beer, use that to find the effective original extract, multiply that by the amount of beer that actually made it into kegs which gives me the total extract and divide that by the weight of the grain I used to brew the beer. For example, if, the back calculated OE is 10 °P and I had 50 gallons of beer of specific gravity 1.010 in kegs the beers total weight would be 8.3 (lbs/ga)*1.01* 50 = 419 lbs. That 50 gallons, before fermentation, would have contained 10% or 41.9 lbs extract. If I used 60 lbs of grain to brew that beer the overall efficiency is 100*41.9/60. Doing it this way you take into account evaporative losses, boil overs, spillage, wort retained in the wort chiller and beer left in the cone of the fermenter i.e. it is the ultimate efficiency.

[dmtaylor]

99% of homebrewers use homebrewing software. Pick some up. There are dozens of options, but the most popular are BeerSmith, ProMash, and BeerTools, in approximately that order. Personally I cannot sing the praises enough of StrangeBrew, which I have been using for 12 years and have accumulated exactly 499 recipes in that time. I think it's the easiest to use, but BeerSmith would be my personal second choice.

If you want to understand how to calculate efficiency by hand, you would do well to pick up a copy of Ray Daniels' "Designing Great Beers". He does a great job of showing how this is calculated. After you do it a couple times, it becomes like second nature if you are math savvy at all.

[thedude00]

I been playing around will beersmith two.