My AG brewing technique is stove top BIAB in my kitchen, based on an 11 litre pot which is the largest size that will comfortably sit on the electric hob. I normally follow the mash with a sparge, then give the grain a firm but not excessive pressing to extract as much liquor out as I can before the boil and then set the spent grain aside during the boil so that anything remaining that will drain does so, although this usually doesn’t amount to very much. I use about 1:1 mash to sparge liquid volumes, and use pre-crushed grain well within date.
Up until recently I normally brew partial mashes and the DME quantities I use mostly masks grain extraction efficiencies and I usually get just under the predicted OG. However yesterday I did a 10 litre AG only brew and found the OG was noticeably less than I expected and worked out that my brewhouse efficiency was of the order of 67%, compared to the 75% used by the BF calculator. That got me thinking as to what others got. A look through past posts came back with a variety of miscellaneous answers from different AG brewing methods. I know grain is relatively cheap but it you need to be aware of your own typical efficiency if you are going to match a recipe to reality.
So the question is what do others get for brewhouse efficiency on their AG systems, and what do people believe significantly affects it?
Up until recently I normally brew partial mashes and the DME quantities I use mostly masks grain extraction efficiencies and I usually get just under the predicted OG. However yesterday I did a 10 litre AG only brew and found the OG was noticeably less than I expected and worked out that my brewhouse efficiency was of the order of 67%, compared to the 75% used by the BF calculator. That got me thinking as to what others got. A look through past posts came back with a variety of miscellaneous answers from different AG brewing methods. I know grain is relatively cheap but it you need to be aware of your own typical efficiency if you are going to match a recipe to reality.
So the question is what do others get for brewhouse efficiency on their AG systems, and what do people believe significantly affects it?