Hi!
I noticed that I don't get anywhere close to the gravity Brewfather estimates for a given recipe. Latest example is a SMASH IPA with a good 5 kg of pilsner malt that, which on my BrewZilla Gen 4 should have landed me somewhere around 1.054 pre boil. Everything went according to the recipe: 71 °C strike water, 64 °C mash for one hour (even a tad longer than that due to being interrupted by having kids), nice recirculation all along, no visible dough nests. What I got though was a pre boil gravity of 1.037 (forgot to test for starch being still present with iodine though).
This is only my fourth brew on the system, the first I forgot to measure and two were rather experimental, but I am still noticing a pattern here in that my efficiency is rather consistently sub par. I now wonder where to find room for improvement. For me, there's no need to squeeze every last bit of sugar out of my grains, yet at a mash efficiency of only 54% where in theory I might even get 80% does not only strike me as unnecessary wasteful, this way I don't know if I could even make anything bigger than an IPA at all without stretching the limits of my system.
My grain milling is one of the things that I suspect might contribute. So much so that I already wish I hadn't bought a three roller mill but one that I can adjust with simple advice from the internet, it seems everything in this field is geared towards two roller mills.
Also I started thinking about pH. Until now I never tampered with it, does it really have the potential to make such a huge difference?
All other suggestions are welcome as well. Cheers!
I absolutely agree that going for perfection is a recipe for unhappiness. It’s only that I’d like to remotely get into the ball park of a recipe. At the moment, I’m so far off that I wouldn’t even dare to try Belgian beers, strong stouts/porters or anything like that, just because I wouldn’t know how to fit enough grain in my mash tun should I try to correct for the low efficiency.
That said: As I also like coffee, I’m aware of how challenging works. I believe I stirred seriously, but you never know. Other than that my recirculation was not continuous, instead I set the pump to 60% - which turns it off 40% of the time, allowing for some backwards flow to happen. This is often enough to free the pump if it’s blocked, so I hoped it would help agitate the grain bed in a way that prevents channels from forming. Again, you never know.
If anybody reading this who also uses an AIO-system like BrewZilla, Grainfather and such and might care to share photos of their grain crush, that might also help me.
I've never heard of back flow during a sparge before, but it's an interesting idea. Is that a common practice these days? I quit brewing maybe 10 years ago, and I was doing 20L batches with gravity feed. It was when the AIO systems were starting to become affordable.
Sorry if I expressed myself not clearly - when my pump is turned off, wort is flowing down the recirculation pipe due to gravity instead of up. It's not a big amount of liquid going into the other direction, just enough to free up a clogged pump often enough. Also, this happens during the mash, not the sparge.