what the hell happend :(

Australia & New Zealand Homebrewing Forum

Help Support Australia & New Zealand Homebrewing Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Mickcr250

Well-Known Member
Joined
14/5/13
Messages
188
Reaction score
24
I did my fourth all grain last night and just pitched my yeast to find i have only got 40% efficiency :(. I have been getting around about 60-65% on my previous brews and have been trying everything to get it up from there! I'm so devistated i just can't believe it.

my recipe was

4500g pilsner
500g wheat
200g caramunich
mashed at 65 and dropped to 64 after 60 minutes

400g dextrose

35g stryrian goldings @ 60
20g saaz @ 10
20g saaz @ flame out
no chill

belle saison yeast

estimated og 1052
measured og 1032

I ended up with about 25l instead of 23

I used a single infusion mash at 65c with no mash out and a double batch sparge first at about 72 and the second i got to 76
I sparged slowly and mixed well i just don't understand.

please help
 
Higher volume will have dropped it a bit so you are either out with your volume calculations or your boiloff rate.

Sparge water could be hotter and slow sparge is relevant to fly, rather than batch sparge. Personally I prefer cool sparge (between 72 and 76) but I'm happy with my processes. Push the sparge temp closer to 80 and see what happens next time.

As with all these questions, you really need to know where in your system and process the deficiency has come from before finding a solution so take my above suggestions with a grain of salt (although final volume is definitely a contributor)

First step - make sure all measuring equipment is accurate.
 
Dumb question. Did you mill the grain.
 
Yes the grain was milled by my lhbs, I checked my thermometer against a candy thermometer and they were the same and my hydrometer floated just under 1000 in water so my efficiency could be worse than thought.
The efficiency was calculated by beersmith so I'm pretty sure that takes the extra 2 l into account but either way I should have had a 6% beer and now I have about 3.5.

In the past brews I was only heating my sparge water too about 78 like it says in beersmith and then I realized that the actual mash had to get realized up to 76 or so. That was why this time I used much hotter sparge water and I thought it would help my efficiency for sure, but now I'm at a loss.
 
Sparging is mainly about getting the sugars out of the grain and into the wort and not about getting converson, so I doubt your sparge technique or temp are to blame for such low efficiency. I'm thinking you aren't getting enough conversion during the mash for some reason. But as manticle said, you need to pin point where you are losing efficiency before you can solve the problem.
 
do you think its too late too add some malt extract or something to get the abv up a bit was hoping to get about a 6 percent beer and right now it looks like 4 at best.
 
What did you use to measure your gravity? Hydrometer? Did you cool the wort to the appropriate temperature?
 
Theoretically yes, it's possible to boil up some DME, cool it and add it to the FV. You'd have to make a pretty dense solution to make much of a difference to the whole batch though because you'd also be adding more water along woth the sugaz.

I wouldn't bother though. Just make another batch so you can a) practice, b ) have more beer, and c) have stronger beer. :beerbang:
 
Mickcr250 said:
do you think its too late too add some malt extract or something to get the abv up a bit was hoping to get about a 6 percent beer and right now it looks like 4 at best.
Yes you can. Malt or dex or both. Might change the flavour a tad but so will brewing under expected gravity. You can boil fermentables and and add at any point (even when you've hit expected FG - just wait for it to come around again).

Up to you - see how it tastes during ferment. Won't help you work out what went wrong but could still push this beer closer to where you want it.
 
jlm said:
What did you use to measure your gravity? Hydrometer? Did you cool the wort to the appropriate temperature?
Good point. Hot wort is much less dense than cool wort. Your hydrometer is most likely calibrated to 20C, so if you measured hot wort the reading will be much lower than the real OG. You can google online hydrometer temp correction calculators if you need to convert the readings.
 
OP suggested gravity measured at yeast pitching time so presumably cool enough.
 
manticle said:
OP suggested gravity measured at yeast pitching time so presumably cool enough.
Oh yeah, should have read it properly.

If the mash temp was OK, and the LHBS crushed the grain so there's unlikely to be a problem there, I'm struggling to think of any one thing that would cause such poor efficiency. Things like mash pH, mash water mineral content, liquor-to-grist ratio, etc. have such small affects on efficiency that even if they all added together the efficiency shouldn't be too bad.

The only thing I can suggest is mashing for longer. 65C is on the low end and conversion can take a little longer because the enzymes are slightly less active at that temp. Maybe try a 90 min mash and see if that helps.
 
Good point on the longer mash time I might have to try that. I really can't think of anything else that I could have done, I went to bed last night thinking I'd hit all my targets and was pretty happy with myself and now I'm just devastated.
I think I will try add a kg of dme tomorrow (boiled in water) as I just don't think I can be happy with a 3.5% saison.
 
Classic/historical saison at 3.5 % is perfect. Originally a low alc, refreshing drink for farm workers
 
Did it definitely seem like 5kg of grain? Is it possible the LHBS left some out, or gave you the wrong order?

EDIT: Actually, I put it through Brewmate and it would need to be at least 1.5kg of the pilsner malt dropped, which I'm sure for a 5kg grain bill would be pretty noticeable. I just thought of it because I use 10+ kilos in my batches and probably wouldn't notice if there was a kilo or so missing. Also, a LHBS here has given my grain order to someone else before.
 
Yep seemed like 5kg I didn't weigh it or anything but was a pretty big bag and they milled it wile I was there so definitely not someone else's orde. Really still can't understand what could cause such a large efficiency decrease.
 
When you say slow sparge, how long are you leaving the sparge water in the mash tun before draining it?
 
Not long, I just dumped the water in mixed it up, let it settle then valouf and drain. Am I supposed to leave it in there for a wile ?
 
Mickcr250 said:
Not long, I just dumped the water in mixed it up, let it settle then valouf and drain. Am I supposed to leave it in there for a wile ?
I found that my efficiency went down when I started rushing the sparge. Now I always let it sit for a good 10 minutes or so.
 
I just checked my thermometer in boiling water and it came up at 98c do you think this could be part of my problem?
 

Latest posts

Back
Top