Sparge/Efficiency issues

[Jack of all biers]

Hi all,

I made up a Schwarzbier yesterday (public holiday ) with a 5.15kg grain bill - 3 Kg Pilsner malt, 1.5kg Munich malt, 250gm Caraspecial II, 200gm Meloiden malt, 200gm Caramunich II.

Stepped infusion mash schedule of 52C 20mins at ratio 2L/Kg, with additions of liquior to increase to 62C 30mins, 68C 30mins, 72C 20mins then 78C for sparging with all temps holding for the times. Mash pH was tested and was between 5 and 5.5 (my pH test doesn't do degrees between the two readings).
Fly sparged with 80C liquor (with recirculation until clear) with the wort running direct to the kettle. Once the tube was immersed I raised it up off the bottom, increased the flow (here's where I believe I went wrong) and lit the burner to save a bit of time. Now with the tap fully open on my new Beer Belly mash tun the wort did flow. Even so I estimate it took 20 - 30 mins (though I didn't time it) to sparge the 32 Litres into the kettle.

Now I tested the end runnings at this stage and got 1030 reading from the mash tun. I tested from the kettle tap (ie from the bottom) for my pre-boil gravity and got 1045, less than I wanted, but I thought was about right. All good so far right. Perfect brew day for my first self made recipe I thought (Ohh the gods were laughing at me for my smugness).

Post 90 min boil, with run off to 26 Litres (aiming for 25L, but hey not bad) I tested the OG. 1043. :unsure: I had to take a second reading as I just couldn't believe it. 1043. Less than the pre-boil gravity! :huh: I was expecting closer to 1050.

It took me a while to figure out how that could be, but I think because I took the pre-boil reading from the kettle tap the initial runnings were of a higher gravity because I raised the outlet tube about 10L into the sparge. So, I calculate that the difference between the highest reading 1045 and the end runnings 1030 is 1037.5 which means my efficiency was 58%. I know it's a rough calculation as gravity may have been 1040, but even if it was slightly higher I am very dissapointed as I used to get close to 80% on my old mash tun.

I have recently acquired the 50L stainless steel Beer Belly mash tun and used to use my home made esky with copper manifold until the esky cracked from too much heating and cooling exposing the not so food friendly styrofoam insulation. I was often getting around the 80% mark with the esky and four column manifold. For those that haven't seen one, the Beer Belly mash tun has a 12 ml tube about 25ml from the bottom directly in the middle of the round (ie 50L pot) mash tun. This opening is underneath a false bottom screen to hold off the grain bed. I'm wondering if I need to seriously slow the sparge from what I am used to because of the internal hyroflo to the single suction point as opposed to my previously even spread along my manifold.

Does have anyone have any experience with the beer belly mash tun (and false bottom) and could give me some tips or tricks to fly sparging with it or alternatively any other ideas where I may have gone so wrong with my efficiency?

And yes, I'll be the first one to admit that just buying a half a kilo more grain will do the trick, but the point is I want to know what I need to do to improve my use of the mash tun (it cost me enough and I'll master it come hell or high water)

Cheers,

Ross

PS the samples tasted good still with great mouth feel so I can recommend the recipe. It'll be more of a mid-strength Schwarzbier that's all.

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

Go 2.5-3.0L with your ratio

If your not getting high SG from your first runings then your mash is the problem

 

[Jack of all biers]

Go 2.5-3.0L with your ratio

If your not getting high SG from your first runings then your mash is the problem

The initial ratio was 2L/Kg at the 52C rest, but nearly 20L was added for all of the rests together, so even by the time it was 62C it was closer to 3L/Kg.

When you say high SG from my first runnings, I assume you mean testing the wort as it first comes out and not that I was doing batch sparge right? If so, I don't normally test the initial runnings as I don't know what to calculate etc and have never had this problem before. Also what do you mean by the mash is the problem? What type of issue do you think could be up with the mash?

Cheers

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

The initial ratio was 2L/Kg at the 52C rest, but nearly 20L was added for all of the rests together, so even by the time it was 62C it was closer to 3L/Kg.

When you say high SG from my first runnings, I assume you mean testing the wort as it first comes out and not that I was doing batch sparge right? If so, I don't normally test the initial runnings as I don't know what to calculate etc and have never had this problem before. Also what do you mean by the mash is the problem? What type of issue do you think could be up with the mash?

Cheers

Do you recirculate your runnings back into the mash before the kettle ?

First (yes ..OK...initial ) runnings are the, well, first runnings into your kettle. The SG should be VERY high. The higher the better

If you are batch sparging then you will normally do 3 runnings to get to kettle volume

 

[Jack of all biers]

Yes I recirculate and no I didn't batch sparge. No I didn't take an SG reading. What SG reading should I be expecting. ie how is that back-calculable to the final OG anyway? Yes a high reading at the initial sparge is ideal, but what should that reading look like in numbers.

Fly sparged with 80C liquor (with recirculation until clear) with the wort running direct to the kettle.

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

Search batch sparging

If you are recirculating then you are batch sparging.

 

[Kingy]

It looks as tho hes only recirculating before the fly sparge. It could be a number of things. Dough balls? Temperature adjustment for hydrometer or using refractormetor incorrectly? Draining to fast? I only get 72ish% from my false bottum weather i do 2 or 3 rinse and drain batch sparges after the initial drain of the mash runnings.

 

[Adam Howard]

DB Stu, he's vorlaufing to set the grain bed and clear it up and then fly sparging. He's not running his mashtun dry and recirculating sparge water.

I'm guessing this is the very first mash you've done in the new tun.

How about trying something much simpler? Do a SMaSH beer, 5kg of base malt, single infusion mash at 66 degrees for 90 minutes at a grain to water ratio of around 2.7:1. Pretty much every time I add a new component to my brewing system I brew a really basic easy beer to test it out so I'm not introducing a bunch of other parameters that could affect the result.

If the very first litre of runnings that goes into the kettle isn't up around 1.070+ then there's issues with your mash.

Also try slowing down your sparge to take at least 45 minutes, heat the kettle as you're doing it so you're basically boiling the moment the sparge finishes to save time. I'd try to sparge between 76-78 degrees too mate.

Those BeerBelly mashtun's are the duck's nuts and should be capable of 85%+ efficiency, I've used my cousin's one and got 80% efficiency without even trying.

 

[MartinOC]

Take your sparge nice & slow. Your final runnings were pretty high at 1030. You should be able to take it down to 1010 without losing quality or extracting tannins etc. Sure, you might have to boil a bit longer, but at least you're getting the most extract from the grains. Acidulating your sparge water will also allow you to take it a little further if you want to play with that idea.

 

[dicko]

Take your sparge nice & slow. Your final runnings were pretty high at 1030. You should be able to take it down to 1010 without losing quality or extracting tannins etc. Sure, you might have to boil a bit longer, but at least you're getting the most extract from the grains. Acidulating your sparge water will also allow you to take it a little further if you want to play with that idea.

Martin is on the money.

Slow the run off down. I have not used a BB mash tun but I went from a copper manifold in a round esky to a stainless pot with a S/Steel false bottom and lost efficiency by a few points. I found by sparging slower I achieved a reasonable result.
Mash PH is also important for extraction...Adelaide water is generally not suitable without at least some adjustments.

Give the mash a good stir at dough in and before starting the sparge as dough balls will cause your problem as well.

 

[S.E]

Give the mash a good stir at dough in and before starting the sparge as dough balls will cause your problem as well.

Do you mean a good stir before starting the recirculation rather than before sparge dicko?

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

+1 for taking it slow

 

[fraser_john]

<snip>
Even so I estimate it took 20 - 30 mins (though I didn't time it) to sparge the 32 Litres into the kettle.
<snip>

+1 for taking it slow, a continuous sparge should take around 60 minutes to accomplish. Sparging works by using the force of osmosis to drag sugars out of the grains and into the less sugary wort/water as you sparge. If you rush it, the sugar does not have time to leech out of the grain.

Give it another go, cut your run off rate to be just under half of what you did and you should be set. If your water has high carbonates, watch the pH of the sparging wort towards the end.

 

[dicko]

Do you mean a good stir before starting the recirculation rather than before sparge dicko?

Yes, but the most important stirring of the mash is at dough in.
You could stir during the recirculation but you will lose the clarity achieved by recirculating.

 

[antiphile]

There is a huge amount of very sage advice being provided here. Early on when I first started 3V, I also had efficiency problems in the mash and I had to examine all my steps one-by-one. For me at least (and I'm not suggesting anyone else is stupid enough to have the same problems), I gained the biggest benefits from:
1. Double crushing the grain. Intuitively you'd think this would double to crush time, but the second run is so quick it only adds about another 20% of the time. This probably added about 5% or a bit more to the mash efficiency; and
2. Going to decoction brewing (using the times and amounts suggested in BeerSmith2). It probably adds 30 or 40 percent to the mash time, but the benefits are really worth it. I'm much happier with the taste of the final product, manage much higher efficiency (managing 10+ percent extra), my last runnings are lower and now approach 1.010, and I feel more "involved in the process".

These days its disappointing to get lower than 85% mash efficiency. Cheers and good luck.

 

[MHB]

I'm unsure that you can get 4 steps with just hot (boiling) water additions, 2 sure but 4 and any water left over for sparging I doubt.
I would be having a very hard look at my calculations, particularly those relating to how much hot water you need for your later additions. If you want to work through the equation rather than rely on software that might not be working right or configured correctly

First calculate MHC (Mash Heat Capacity) = (0.4*grain weight)+(water weight) / weigh grain + weight of water
from what you gave if the OP Mass Grain was 5.15Kg and Mass Water was 10.3Kg so your MHC = 12.36

To do your first step from 52-62oC and lets assume that you hot water was at 98oC by the time you got it into the mash.
Weight of water at 98oC = (MHC*Mass in the tun) * (Target temp - Current temp) / Boiling Water temp (98oC) -Target temp
Hot water mass = 12.36*15.45 / 98-62 = 5.3Kg (L same same)

If you do the same for each of the following steps, I think you run out of water before the 80oC rest, especially as the more water in the tun the more boiling water it takes to achieve the next step.

Mark

 

[TheWiggman]

I agree with MHB, there is something is amiss in general here.

1. Final runnings at 1.030. I struggle to believe it could be that high if fly sparging AND your initial runnings are > 1.045. Normal final runnings are in vicinity of 1.010 unless you are batch sparging..
2. For an OG of 1.043 with 26l, starting with 32l, you had a pre-boil gravity of 1.035

Did you even add water for the 'sparge' or did you just run off?

Edit: Oh and Mark, lower case k for kilo

 

[antiphile]

Howdy Wiggman

I'm not sure how the OPs mash system is, but until I changed several practices I was also getting final runnings in the mid 1.020s usually, with the best - err, I mean the worst - at 1.028. That was a "bigger" beer, and I use a 50 litre esky with a homemade rectangular copper manifold as per John Palmer's guidelines in the How to Brew online book. So, I have no problems believing 1.030 for final runnings is possible. It was also fly sparging and taking about 45 mins to do the sparge (and recycling the contents of the mash as well).

Now the final runnings average about 1.012 or 13, so I'm a lot happier. All of this is even after the MHB guru pointed out that for an esky that size I need to mash to make a knockout of at least 35 litres To get a grain bed of sufficient depth (though I usually do for a minimum of 40).

Cheers mate.

 

[Ditchnbeer]

Sparging slow is great advice, and to ensure that your system doesn't channel when fly sparging. But I would like to add from experience its important to take care when measuring gravity when sparging. I know that if I casually 'grab' some wort I could get a low reading. I use my mash paddle, give the wort a stir then bring up the paddle and drip onto my refrac. Take a reading and then measure twice more to get average. Somedays I think my refract is not right (another topic) and I cool 150mls quickly in ice water and measure with hydrometer - painful but at least I can trust that reading.

 

[Jack of all biers]

Thanks all for the advice. It is difficult to make out what someone has done (and the equipment they have to do it) from reading it (just as hard to write without waffling on too much either) so I appreciate the effort to read and reply. Firstly;

DB Stu, he's vorlaufing to set the grain bed and clear it up and then fly sparging. He's not running his mashtun dry and recirculating sparge water.

I'm guessing this is the very first mash you've done in the new tun.

How about trying something much simpler? Do a SMaSH beer, 5kg of base malt, single infusion mash at 66 degrees for 90 minutes at a grain to water ratio of around 2.7:1. Pretty much every time I add a new component to my brewing system I brew a really basic easy beer to test it out so I'm not introducing a bunch of other parameters that could affect the result.

If the very first litre of runnings that goes into the kettle isn't up around 1.070+ then there's issues with your mash.

Also try slowing down your sparge to take at least 45 minutes, heat the kettle as you're doing it so you're basically boiling the moment the sparge finishes to save time. I'd try to sparge between 76-78 degrees too mate.

Those BeerBelly mashtun's are the duck's nuts and should be capable of 85%+ efficiency, I've used my cousin's one and got 80% efficiency without even trying.

Yep I recirculated (or returned the 'Vorlauf') until the runnings were clear then began the fly sparge. (different use of terminology so sorry for confusion)

No, this was the third mash with the mash tun and both prior were simplish ingredients/methods, although the first mash I did a single decoction. Both of the first two ended in stuck sparges after some very slow sparging (first one took 3 hours), but I later sought some advice from Wayne at Beer Belly and found that I hadn't been tightening down the false bottom enough so this was the first time that the sparge ran with any decent flow. (hence why I pushed it way too much, Live and learn eh. I appreciate the advice about slowing it down and as I suspected is likely the main culprit and probably caused some channelling.

Mash PH is also important for extraction...Adelaide water is generally not suitable without at least some adjustments.

Give the mash a good stir at dough in and before starting the sparge as dough balls will cause your problem as well.

Dicko, Mash pH was between 5 and 5.5 so I doubt the infamous 'hard' Adelaide water was the culprit for mash efficiency and I have never had that problem before. By the by, the 2014 SA water info shows average hardness as being 89 mg/L of CaCO3, so not that bad after all.
I forgot to mention in the original post that dough in was thorough with the mash being additionally stirred after 20mins then every 15 mins the whole way through until the 78C rest. (this is timed)

I'm unsure that you can get 4 steps with just hot (boiling) water additions, 2 sure but 4 and any water left over for sparging I doubt.
I would be having a very hard look at my calculations, particularly those relating to how much hot water you need for your later additions. If you want to work through the equation rather than rely on software that might not be working right or configured correctly

First calculate MHC (Mash Heat Capacity) = (0.4*grain weight)+(water weight) / weigh grain + weight of water
from what you gave if the OP Mass Grain was 5.15Kg and Mass Water was 10.3Kg so your MHC = 12.36

To do your first step from 52-62oC and lets assume that you hot water was at 98oC by the time you got it into the mash.
Weight of water at 98oC = (MHC*Mass in the tun) * (Target temp - Current temp) / Boiling Water temp (98oC) -Target temp
Hot water mass = 12.36*15.45 / 98-62 = 5.3Kg (L same same)

If you do the same for each of the following steps, I think you run out of water before the 80oC rest, especially as the more water in the tun the more boiling water it takes to achieve the next step.

Mark

Mark, thanks, I don't have/use any software prefering to manually calculate. Your calculations are slightly different to those I use (from Palmer) which is;
Mash Infusion Equation:
Wa = (T2 - T1)(.41G + Wm)/(Tw - T2)
Where:
Wa = The amount of boiling water added (in litres).
Wm = The total amount of water in the mash (in litres).
T1 = The initial temperature (¡C) of the mash.
T2 = The target temperature (¡C) of the mash.
Tw = The actual temperature (¡C) of the infusion water.
G = The amount of grain in the mash (in kilograms).

My Tw temp was calculated as 95C and worked perfectly on the first infusion, but I lowered it after the second one came up 2C short. Lowered to 92C (was a guess and a good one as the other steps all worked perfectly). Luckily I kept the piece of paper I wrote all the calculations down on, so the water addtions went as such; 52C initial was as stated 2L/Kg (10.3L), then 3.82L added to bring to 62C, 3.66L (plus another 2.8L to bring it that last 2C (yes this is correct and with all the stirring, it remained stabile so please no speculations of cold/hot spots) for 68C, 4.77L raised to 72C and 9.62L raised to 77C. That left a total of 34.91 (lets say 35L) minus what ever for grain absorbtion (don't bother to work that out).

So with 35L of water in the mash, I agree with some and think a quick sparge may not have been my only problem (I've never done so many steps with an infusion step method and normally do decoctions. The old try something new and get into new unexplored territory :unsure: ).

I agree with MHB, there is something is amiss in general here.

1. Final runnings at 1.030. I struggle to believe it could be that high if fly sparging AND your initial runnings are > 1.045. Normal final runnings are in vicinity of 1.010 unless you are batch sparging..
2. For an OG of 1.043 with 26l, starting with 32l, you had a pre-boil gravity of 1.035

Did you even add water for the 'sparge' or did you just run off?

Final runnings of 1030 it was though. I did wonder as I normally hit 1010 to 1014, but as my boiler reading told me 1045 then I ignored the final running reading to my peril. And to those that wondered, all gravity readings were done at 20-22C (measured with thermo) and with a hydrometer.
Yep water was added for the sparge, but you're right, given the amount of water already present in the mash tun it was pretty pointless (but I didn't see that at the time [trees for the forrest!])

So lessons learnt by me (and hopefully anyone else who gets a chuckle out of reading this later on).
1. Don't get so confident that you don't see the trees for the forrest (ie that the amount of mash water is so close to your boiling volume alarm bells should be tolling).
2. Slower sparge with the new mash tun (i'll aim for an hour sparge and see how I go).
3. If doing so many rests then fall back to decoction or do batch sparging for those brews.

Thanks to all who contributed. I'll update when I next mash what efficiencies I get.

Cheers, Ross