paddy.odwyer
Member
Hi there,
I'm very new to mash efficiency (and brewhouse efficiency as well for that matter) and I wanted to gain some insight as to how you measure this effiency, namely, do you do it before or after sparging.
For example, I just did a BIAB clone recipe of Young Henry's Newtowner Pale Ale.
I mashed with 23L of water, and then dunk sparged the bag into 8L of water. I took a gravity reading directly after the mash, which was 1.051, and then also after combining the sparge water to the mash, which was 1.044. This makes sense to me, as the sparge water would be diluting the mash, and therfore reducing the specific gravity reading.
So far, I've used a total of 31L water. However, after adding this sparge water, my total pre-boil volume was 27L, therefore I lost 4L to grain absorption (which was expected because I had roughly 4.5KG of grains, and squeezed the bag both after mashing and sparging.
Because I had these two readings at my disposal, when I tried to calculate my mash efficiency, I decided to do it both before and after the sparging process.
So, I took the PPG of each of the grains, multiplied them by their respective grain bills (in pounds), and then divided it by each specific volume. So for the BEFORE SPARGE efficiency reading, I divided by 6.08 gallons, and for AFTER SPARGE I divided by 8.19 gallons.
What I found shocked me and I can't quite figure out the math.
BEFORE SPARGE efficiency was 51/62.5 = 81.6%, this seems normal to me. But AFTER SPARGE, was 44/46.4 = 94.8%.
Is this purely because I'm accounting for all the water being used, or is there something more complicated occurring here?
Apologies if this is blindingly obvious maths...Like I said, I'm new to the efficiency game, and its kind of boggling my mind a bit hahaha.
Cheers, Paddy.
I'm very new to mash efficiency (and brewhouse efficiency as well for that matter) and I wanted to gain some insight as to how you measure this effiency, namely, do you do it before or after sparging.
For example, I just did a BIAB clone recipe of Young Henry's Newtowner Pale Ale.
I mashed with 23L of water, and then dunk sparged the bag into 8L of water. I took a gravity reading directly after the mash, which was 1.051, and then also after combining the sparge water to the mash, which was 1.044. This makes sense to me, as the sparge water would be diluting the mash, and therfore reducing the specific gravity reading.
So far, I've used a total of 31L water. However, after adding this sparge water, my total pre-boil volume was 27L, therefore I lost 4L to grain absorption (which was expected because I had roughly 4.5KG of grains, and squeezed the bag both after mashing and sparging.
Because I had these two readings at my disposal, when I tried to calculate my mash efficiency, I decided to do it both before and after the sparging process.
So, I took the PPG of each of the grains, multiplied them by their respective grain bills (in pounds), and then divided it by each specific volume. So for the BEFORE SPARGE efficiency reading, I divided by 6.08 gallons, and for AFTER SPARGE I divided by 8.19 gallons.
What I found shocked me and I can't quite figure out the math.
BEFORE SPARGE efficiency was 51/62.5 = 81.6%, this seems normal to me. But AFTER SPARGE, was 44/46.4 = 94.8%.
Is this purely because I'm accounting for all the water being used, or is there something more complicated occurring here?
Apologies if this is blindingly obvious maths...Like I said, I'm new to the efficiency game, and its kind of boggling my mind a bit hahaha.
Cheers, Paddy.