Help With Brew Magic

[tommyo51]

I have been searching for help on this before i posted this but can't find anything. I have been using a Brew Magic for 6 months now to make 5 gal batches and everything has been great. Total Brew house eff has been any where from 90 to 95%. Now I have started to make 10 gal batches and my mash eff have been going through the roof! The last two 10 gal batches have hit 180% mash eff. I have had to dump already 20 gal of beer because after fermentation has been done there is a lot of astrigency and off flavors (I got a bit of them in the sweet wort before fermentation but thought they would be taken care of by the yeast).

I have been using Beer Smith to help with my recipe creation and recording of events. I may be using the wrong equipment profile for the brew magic and may need to up the eff so that we use less grain and maybe decress the draw of sugars in the mash as well as the tannis and anything else we don't want. I have used the scale up feature in beersmith and thats where it started to go haywire. The heating element that the system uses and the houseing are clean. Not understanding what I am failing at and it is frustrating. Here is the eq profile for the brew magic as it stands:

Brew Magic:
Brewhouse Efficiency: 80% (this may need to be raised, but have found no advice on it so just left it where it was)
Hop Utilization factor: 100.00%

Mash/Lauter Tun
Mash Tun Volume: 15.5 gal
Mash Tun Weight: 29.70 lb
Mash Tun Specific Heat: 0.12 Cal/gram-deg C
Lauter Tun Deadspace: .25 gal

Boiler
Top up water for kettle: 0.00
Boil Volume: 7.18
Boil Time 60 min
Boil Off 1.36 gal
Total Boil Off 1.36 gal
evaporation rate 18.9%/hour
Post Boil vol 5.82 gal
Cooling Shrinkage (4%) 4%
Cooling loss .23 gal

Fermenter/Bottling Volumes
Los to Trub and Chiller: .6 gal
Top Up Water: 0.00
Batch Volume 5.00 gal
Fermenter Loss 0.00
Bottling Volume (w/o starter) 5.00 gal

 

[tommyo51]

Oh I forgot, I am using the Temperature Mash option from BeerSmith with adjusted temps for equipment selected

 

[jeffmeh]

180% mash efficiency means that you extracted more sugars than exist in the grain. You either have grain that has more sugars than what you have specified in the software, or your gravity measurements are off.

 

[tommyo51]

180% mash efficiency means that you extracted more sugars than exist in the grain. You either have grain that has more sugars than what you have specified in the software, or your gravity measurements are off.

Ok that makes sense but the where are the off flavors coming from? Not to mention that it's totally fine at 5 gal. I'll have to check the measurements again. Thank you.

 

[MercMan]

Astringency = tannins and tannins tells me that you are over sparging. You need to cut your sparge off sooner than you are and you should be fine.

 

[rangrr4834]

Are you fermenting the entire 10 gallon batch in one vessel or splitting it up? If you are fermenting in one are you pitching quite a bit more yeast than your five gallon required? Long lag times, etc = more esters and off flavors.

 

[tommyo51]

Are you fermenting the entire 10 gallon batch in one vessel or splitting it up? If you are fermenting in one are you pitching quite a bit more yeast than your five gallon required? Long lag times, etc = more esters and off flavors.

I am fermenting the entire 10 gallon batch in one vessel, and using the correct pitch rate (then again im rechecking my calculations and I'll post them up, and if im wrong let me know, I just want to fix this). I am using a stir plate to generate a 2 L starter, and using White Labs Yeast which would take 100 Billion cells and take it to 534.9 Billion according to Beer Smith (I used newly ordered vials, again i will put down my own hand written calculations). Out of 6 ten gallon batches, three of them have had the problem. I took apart everything today and cleaned the hell out of the system.