Here's a weird one, curious to see what the group thinks.
Making our IPA recipe... have made it numerous times, just down to tweaking hops at this point:
20# 2 row
3# 10L
4oz Carapils
10.5gal target into fermenter with 60min mash @150, 60min boil, 12gal pre-boil volume. 1.056 pre-boil SG, 1.064 OG into the fermenter.
Rig is keggles, with a false bottom and dip tube in the mash tun. Normally we're pushing 80% eff with the fly sparge.
Grain is milled at Adventures in Homebrewing, but then we run it through our own at home (double crush) to be sure. So crush was good.
This time we had a split of 1.5# fresh Carapils, 1.5# that had been sitting around in a plastic bag, cool storage since around March. All 2-row was fresh.
Mash-in was perfect on-target, 7.25gal plus 2gal for the false bottom. Hit our temp within a degree and stayed there.
Didn't bother to check pH, as it's usually in the zone with this recipe, plus we don't have super-accurate pH strips.
When we got to sparging... needed 8 gal to sparge, but our hot liquor tank is only comfortable with 6.5gal. So we heated 2 gal separate, started by dumping those in and stirring... then vorlauf (ran clear pretty quickly after 1-1.5gal), then right into the normal fly sparge.
But right off the get-go, the numbers were low, started at only 1.056SG right out the tube to begin with, and dropped from there (of course). Actual OG measured was only 1.051 - about 64% efficiency. Will still make decent beer, but a touch thin...
So I want to redo that batch and try to rectify that process error.
My culprits right now for the source of the loss of efficiency...
#1 thought is our goofy partial-batch-sparge process. Might be messing up the high efficiency we should get from a proper fly sparge. Plus I seem to recall that when we were pumping out 80% batches, we were making 5gal batches... which didn't have HLT volume issues.
#2 - maybe my mash is too wet? This would kinda make more sense to me in terms of just poor conversion efficiency, even before the sparge happens... plus I think some of those earlier high-eff 5gal batches mashed in on the dry side, perhaps closer to 1.10 qts/lb?
Any other ideas? As mentioned, I think we'll try this one again, with more careful attention to the above two steps, and see how it goes...
Making our IPA recipe... have made it numerous times, just down to tweaking hops at this point:
20# 2 row
3# 10L
4oz Carapils
10.5gal target into fermenter with 60min mash @150, 60min boil, 12gal pre-boil volume. 1.056 pre-boil SG, 1.064 OG into the fermenter.
Rig is keggles, with a false bottom and dip tube in the mash tun. Normally we're pushing 80% eff with the fly sparge.
Grain is milled at Adventures in Homebrewing, but then we run it through our own at home (double crush) to be sure. So crush was good.
This time we had a split of 1.5# fresh Carapils, 1.5# that had been sitting around in a plastic bag, cool storage since around March. All 2-row was fresh.
Mash-in was perfect on-target, 7.25gal plus 2gal for the false bottom. Hit our temp within a degree and stayed there.
Didn't bother to check pH, as it's usually in the zone with this recipe, plus we don't have super-accurate pH strips.
When we got to sparging... needed 8 gal to sparge, but our hot liquor tank is only comfortable with 6.5gal. So we heated 2 gal separate, started by dumping those in and stirring... then vorlauf (ran clear pretty quickly after 1-1.5gal), then right into the normal fly sparge.
But right off the get-go, the numbers were low, started at only 1.056SG right out the tube to begin with, and dropped from there (of course). Actual OG measured was only 1.051 - about 64% efficiency. Will still make decent beer, but a touch thin...
So I want to redo that batch and try to rectify that process error.
My culprits right now for the source of the loss of efficiency...
#1 thought is our goofy partial-batch-sparge process. Might be messing up the high efficiency we should get from a proper fly sparge. Plus I seem to recall that when we were pumping out 80% batches, we were making 5gal batches... which didn't have HLT volume issues.
#2 - maybe my mash is too wet? This would kinda make more sense to me in terms of just poor conversion efficiency, even before the sparge happens... plus I think some of those earlier high-eff 5gal batches mashed in on the dry side, perhaps closer to 1.10 qts/lb?
Any other ideas? As mentioned, I think we'll try this one again, with more careful attention to the above two steps, and see how it goes...