Efficiency

[ercol]

Afternoon,

Forgive my ignorance, i'm still relatively new to this - i understand efficiency is referred to as a way to estimate/calculate the amount of liquid you're likely to get out of the grain after mashing/sparging under the assumption that the grain will soak some up- excusing my poor wording, is this about right?

Now in my iphone brewing program (brewpal) which i have been using for all my recipes - i dont have the facility to make a full 20L - 25L brew and it handily calculates the scale down for everything for me if i put in a 'standard' recipe and then tell it i only want 12L - Its set to 75% efficiency. This was the default it opened with when i downloaded it and sounded 'reasonable' to me (having not brewed anything at that point i had no idea) however when brewing i'm ending up with significantly more liquid than the program suggests i should (15L brew, supposedly 19L in to the boiler - actually had nearer 24)

I'm guessing this is because brewing in a bag allows one to 'drain the grain' as well as squeezing the bag to get even more liquid out - so i guess 3 questions;

1) is squeezing the hell out of the bag 'safe' - do i run the risk of off flavours or anything or is it a good method to get 'the most out of the grain'?
and 2) if so - as this makes my efficiency higher, how do i calculate it to put in to my brewing program?

finally 3) I've been boiling for a little longer to compensate for this (but still adding hops at specified times) - again are there any 'risks' in doing this or is it just more concentration and thus stronger beer?

Thanks,

Ercol

[smeggedup]

I wouldn't squeeze the hell out of the bag you may well end up with off flavours.

But you need to set the mash tun loss to zero as the bag should drain it all out, also if you set the pre gravity and record it, then go into results it'll show you your efficiency, if you've ended up with more wort than planned you can adjust the required volume to what you recieved, but not adjust the grain bill to match it, then take a look in your results again, it will now show you the check efficiency for the volume you recieved.
As you learn your setup more you will be able to more accurately predict the volume, after 17 I'm still almost there, but not quite.
Even an experienced brewer would have to re-learn a new setup.
At the moment as long as your getting nice beer is the fact your getting more beer a real problem, send the excess to me problem solved
I know when I get to the end of a brew I wished I'd got a few more litres of it.

[ercol]

Thanks for the info - advice on not squeezing the bag too much has been duly noted.

As for ending up with more - certainly not complaining about that, i've just done 3 in a row with the same situation and had been panicking i'd end up with 'watered down' tasting beer, hence the additional boiling. If you're saying thats not the case and i'm just ending up with more beer, then i shall rejoice in my unintentionally extra-strong beers i've made so far and rejoice further when i make the next one and get more out of it!

[The_blue]

I'm not sure i belive over squeezing can extract anything bad.

[GrowlingDogBeer]

I'm not sure i belive over squeezing can extract anything bad.

It can if the bag splits

[smeggedup]

Thanks for the info - advice on not squeezing the bag too much has been duly noted.

As for ending up with more - certainly not complaining about that, i've just done 3 in a row with the same situation and had been panicking i'd end up with 'watered down' tasting beer, hence the additional boiling. If you're saying thats not the case and i'm just ending up with more beer, then i shall rejoice in my unintentionally extra-strong beers i've made so far and rejoice further when i make the next one and get more out of it!

One of my brews was a banks bitter grain from Worcester hop shop, should have been 3.2% at 23l ended up being 25.5% at 2.5%.
But was still a nice pint For a banks anyway
All down to taste, if you enjoy it does it matter the strength ?

As for squeezing it, I maybe wrong but believe that you get off tastes below 1.010 when sparging and squeezing it would surely draw out all the off tasting wort out that's below 1.010.
You may want to take a look over on the brew in a bag area of the forum or theres a few web pages dedicated to biab youll be able to get better guided info.

But by the sounds your doing fine.

[stux]

The liquid you squeeze out is at the same SG as the rest of the liquid. There is no danger of squeezing out off-flavours in BIAB