Ok, I just brewed on my GrainFather for the first time in a couple of months, and the first time since I committed to trying the "straight away" sparge method. I got everything ready to go, pulled the malt pipe up, waited for it to drain to the top of the tabs on the top plate, then poured a litre of 75C water in. By the time I filled my litre jug up with the next lot of sparge water, it was time to pour that in too. Sure enough my 11 litre sparge was over in not much more than 10 minutes! I was rapt as it's taken me 45 minutes previously.
BUT...(why is there always a but??)...after removing the malt pipe I took an OG, and was a good 6 points under what was expected! It's the first time this has happened to me on the Grainfather. I used some dextrose to get up to the OG I wanted (I didn't mind for this beer as I'm going for a dry hoppy pale). Later on I plugged my numbers back into Beersmith and it tells me I got a little over 70% efficiency, rather than the 80-82% I normally get. That's almost as low as I used to get no-sparging on my BIAB system.
To be clear, it's total efficiency I'm talking about here...here's a snip from Beersmith.
efficiency.JPG
I'm sure we discussed efficiency with the "fast sparge" method previously and those doing it indicated no issues. But it's the only thing I changed on this brew...I left the roller width the same on my mill 'coz I wanted to only change 1 thing at a time.
Anyone else switched to the fast sparge method and noticing a big efficiency drop?