Low Efficiency Problems - Second Brew Day with Brew Devil (Klarstein/Ace/Hopcat/Guten Clone)

[Jaedee]

Hey folks,

Second ever brew for me today. I created a recipe on BrewFather (using a Gypsy Hill recipe for inspiration). Click here for my recipe.

Summary: I had an efficiency of around 63%, and I don't know why. I've documented every step carefully.

Mash: The water volumes generated by Brewfather were 23.47l mash water, 6.05l sparge water. I followed this very accurately, weighing the water at each step.

Grain was stirred in very slowly, with the assistance of my partner. There were absolutely no dough-balls.

The top plate was added, just allowed to sink to meet the grain bed. No issues.

Recirculation was performed for 90 minutes at 67 degrees Celsius. No blockages, no overflows, wort ran very clear.

Pre-boil OG readings before sparging were in the region of 1.051 to 1.053. This was short of my intended target, which was 1.061 (as shown in the recipe.)

Sparge:

After sparging with the required 6.05l at 77 degrees Celsius, OG dropped. The last OG reading before the boil was around 1.040. The sparge seemed very fast, but we were careful to sparge slowly and used the top mesh plate as a diffuser.

Boil:

At boil, I added the sugars and the first hop additions.

Taking regular samples from the wort during the boil and allowing them to cool revealed I was going to miss my post-boil OG, so I increased the boil time to 90 mimutes to try and compensate. I obviously lost volume, but I'm glad I did this, as it did have the effect of increasing the OG.

Hopstand:

I added the remaining hops for 30 minutes and whirlpooled a bit.

Cooling:

After the boil I used an immersion chiller to bring the whole thing down to 20 degrees Celsius, and transferred to the FV. The OG at this stage is now 1.067, and it's fermenting as we speak.

Outcome:

If I get attenuation of 80%, which is average for this yeast, I'll be looking at an FG of 1.014, or 7.2% ABV. Clealy this is quite a way off the target of 8.4%.

Questions:

Where am I going wrong with this? Please help me!

Some thoughts:

1. Is it the water/grain ratio? The sparge seemed fast, but what do I know? Do the water volumes look right to you?
2. I have no other ideas.

 

[IainM]

I've not used the brew devil, but my system is similar and I always get lower efficiency with higher gravity brews compared to when I did BIAB, although 63% is particularly low and, while it is high gravity, it isn't RIS territory. If the sparge was fast, then that would suggest that the crush could have been finer, which is obviously something you can't control with pre-crushed grain. Another thing, you might have added the grain too slowly. At least at the beginning of doughing in, when the strike water is hot and the mash is thin enough for you to stir it in quickly, you want to get it in quickly, especially if your mash temp is 67C. All the time the grain is much above 70C it is losing diastatic power, and the hotter it is the quicker it is lost.

 

[MyQul]

I suspect it's because the sparge is too little/low. Your sparging at 0.99L/KG which is even lower than mine at 1.25L/kg Iand I get 66% effeciency. I'm happy with this as I get 66% bang on every time, so my calcs are always correct. I was discussing this with another member a while back (cant remember who) and they suggested my sparge was low and to sparge more if I wanted better effeciency

 

[Slid]

You could try stirring the mash at 30m and again at 60m - this is a well known "trick" using a Grainfather and if feasible, could work for you?
This is a bit of a monster Grain bill, with a lot of unmalted grain and it is possible that there was insufficient diastatic conversion present?

If the mash seemed quite liquid, you could increase the sparge water a bit and that would perhaps help a bit.

 

[The Baron]

Too much mash volume and not enough sparge water. I tend to do 20l for mash and 12 to 14 ltr for sparge and get 70% minimum brew house efficiency this on a standard 60 min boil and I use the Ace