Calculating Brewing Efficiency
As an all grain brewer you want to extract as much sugars from your grains as possible. This is called mash efficiency, and it’s an important role for home brewers who are looking to improve their techniques.
Careful notes should be taken during the brewing process, as should be done with all aspects of brewing. If you don’t know how much of a certain ingredient was used, or how many gallons of water… how can you improve your next recipe.
To calculate your mash efficiency, you need to know:
1) The gravity of the wort in the boil pot
2) How many gallons of wort were collected
3) The number of pounds of grain used in the mash
You take the gravity points, multiply it by the number of gallons and then divide by the number of pounds of grain. The number you get should be somewhere around 30.
example:
1.053 or 53 x 6.5 gal = 344.5 / 10 lbs = 34.45 mash efficiency
Now that’s pretty good!
27 is okay, 29 is good, and over 30 is great. If it is 25 or below, you are lautering too fast or you are not getting good conversion in the mash, which could be caused by having too coarse a grist, the wrong temperature, not enough time, it got cold, or a pH factor…etc.
Filed under: Brewing 101 on June 24th, 2009
