Another efficiency question

Being an engineer at heart and a bit of a geek, I am trying to get my head around the numbers in BeerSmith and understand what my losses are.  This started with brewing five gallon batches and only  ending up with a little over four into the bottles.  Now I use BeerSmith and have built an equipment profile and my own mash and fermentation profiles.

I am currently getting between 75-80% Mash efficiency and 60-70% Brewhouse efficiency (as indicated by BeerSmith).  Yesterday, my most recent batch had for some reason mush lower grain absorption than the default BeerSmith value of 0.96 Fl oz/oz.  Closer to 0.56 so I ended up with an extra 0.6 gallons out of the mash tun which I am sure hurt my numbers which came out at 76% Mash efficiency.

I have read on this forum the drivers behind Brewhouse efficiency and I think I have a handle on it.  I am using the two stage batch sparge method with roughly equal volumes from the mash and the sparge.  The next batch I make, I will stir a couple of times during the 60 minute mash to bring more sugars out, and I think I will measure the wort drained from the mash tun and adjust the quantity of sparge water accordingly so I do not end up with extra wort.  Is this a good approach?

As far as brewhouse efficiency goes, there are a number of equipment losses that I cannot do a lot about - the mash tun has 0.75g of deadspace.  If I was desperate for some extra wort, I guess I could tilt the mash tun, and drain that, but I do not like to do that.  The kettle has 0.87g of deadspace, and I like to leave that and the trub so it doesn't get into the fermenter.  The fermenter has a drain spigot I use and that leaves ~0.5g.  Is there anything else I can do to improve efficiency?

The way I see it, as long as I know what my losses are, and what the efficiency is, then I can put that number into BeerSmith and it will scale the recipe accordingly.  Yes it may cost me a little more in grain, but that is a small price to pay for a home brewer wanting clean, good tasting beer and a hassle-free workday.

Am I missing anything?

Paul

This answer may not directly address your questions but keep in mind that the supplied equipment and mash settings are there more for suggestion or as a starting point. You need to customize your profiles to match your equipment and mash techniques. You will not get the most out of Beersmith until you do.

OK, so here is where to look to minimize your losses and improve your efficiency:

The key in all this is to be methodical and consistent in your process.  If you are all over the place in how you use your equipment and how you measure your water, you will never really know if you are making a change for the better.

First, any losses in the brew house.  If you can recover some by tipping your mash tun (I do it when I use my mash tun) and as long as you can do it consistently to the same extent each time, that will help.  Losses to trub and chilling, pump hold back, losses in lines which don't drain fully all add up to cost you in volume and sugars. 

Next, is the mash efficiency.  the top five things that help with mash efficiency are: grind, grind, grind, grind, and grind.  This is followed by: good wetting of the grains in the mash water, water chemistry and mash pH and everything else, including stirring during the mash.  Personally, I have found that if you have stirred in the grains well and dispersed them with the mash water, additional stirring really does not gain you much, if anything, and leads to additional loss in temperature which can result in inconsistent fermentability of the wort. 

If you are not grinding your own grains, you may ask that some or all of them get reground to attain a slightly finer particle size of the inner kernels.  You don't want to grind the husks up too much, as that will impede the drainage of your mash tun, but you do not want to find many (or any) uncrushed kernels in your grains.  I've found that preconditioning the grain with a light spray of water before you grind (if you are grinding your own) will give you more intact husks, a slightly finer crush, and less flour.

Most supply shops keep their crush a bit on the coarse side to prevent customers from complaining about stuck sparges.  Most brewers will fork over an extra buck or two for the additional grain, but complain endlessly about having to deal with a mash tun which will not drain.

Anything after the wort goes into the fermenter is not used in calculating the brew house efficiency.

I keep a running spreadsheet with my volumes and gravity readings at every point.  From this, I can track my grain absorption, boil off rate, and brew house losses at every stage to update and fine tune my equipment profiles.  Additionally, I can see if there is a change in any of these readings which may be due to a change in process, materials, or poor measurement on my part.  It is a hold-over from the (former, and always) process engineer in me that has served me well through many changes in equipment. 

+1 to everything Oginme said. The only thing that I would add is that your efficiencies sound good considering you like to leave all of the trub and sediment behind. I do the same and have similar results. Although some recently published experiments show that dumping trub into the fermenter doesn't harm the beer, I still like to rack clean.

Excellent inputs Oginme and good confirmation from Bob that others are seeing similar numbers to me when using a similar process.  The main loss which I feel I can do something about is in not leaving any wort in the mash tun.  My last brew this week resulted in an extra 0.6 gallons of decent SG wort so I need to address that and ensure I am washing the maximum amount of sugars out of the mash, with my pre-boil volume (7.24 gallons).  Minus the mash tun screen loss and grain absorption of course.

To your point I do take readings of gravity, temp and pH throughout the process and I have a spreadsheet I have built of the last six batches so I can monitor the efficiencies and losses.  I am also thinking of building a work-day template to plug in all the values as the brew progresses as I always seem to miss one or two readings and those are the ones that are always important!  Are there any templates already out there for brew-day data gathering?  The Brewer's Friend Brew Day Checklist doesn't address the readings that need to be taken.

Good point on the criticality of the correct grind.  I have the LHBS crush my grains but will examine the crush next time and ensure it is as fine as possible while leaving the husks intact.  Knock wood, I have never had a stuck sparge.  I also do not use pumps so there are no pump or line losses to bring into the equation and I have had my water tested and am adjusting the water chemistry.  The mash pH 10 minutes in and with a room temperature sample taken from the middle of the mash was 5.44 and the temperature 154F which I believe are good readings.

Thanks for all the help,

Paul

It sounds as if you are on the right track, measuring and recording everything to get consistent results. I went through a similar process when I first started all-grain brewing and my efficiency was low. I realized that it would take me a very long time to optimize the process if I was only brewing once a month and changing one variable at a time, so I did a set of test mashes. I purchased a lot of base malt, mashed it and measured it, then dumped it. There was no boil, no hops or yeast involved so it was cheap and fast and I could do one mash every couple of days until I had my efficiency improved and my volumes characterized.

The BeerSmith brew sheet does not have places for all the steps and measurements that I like to make. You can either develop a custom report in BeerSmith if you are handy with HTML, or you can develop one in Excel. I used Excel at first because it is easy to change, but now that the list is more or less complete I made it into a BeerSmith report.

--GF

Thanks Giga.  This approach sounds good.

Paul

Attached is my customized Brewsheet. You will undoubtedly want to make changes to it, and that can be done with any HTML editor or even a text editor. It doesn't use anything very fancy, just tables and importing the BeerSmith variables.

--GF

This worked well.  I tried some basic edits and it seems to work.  Thanks Giga for helping me understand the BeerSmith reports.

Paul