Why is AG brewing better than extract?

[pantsmachine]

I am going to put together a brewday post on my batch from the other night but can someone give me a hint to working out brewhouse efficency. Is it SG of sparged wort divide by a grain weight figure & fluid volume. Interested as i used 4.5kg of grain with final preboil volume of 26ltrs of water and ended up with a reading of 1.034 before i added the non grain products and started the boil.

[adm]

See here - about halfway down the page it shows how to calculate efficiency, plus has a handy dandy table of the potential extracts for different malts:

http://www.jimsbeerkit.co.uk/recipe_formulation.htm

[pantsmachine]

Thanks for that Adm. I achieved an efficency of 72% which will do me fine for a first ag effort.

[MARMITE]

Whilst I agree with the various posts so far regarding quality v effort and time no one has mentioned the pride you get from producing a quality beer using (almost) raw ingredients. There is a lot to learn and we never stop learning but when the end product is rearly good you can say there has been a fair bit of effort but it was worth it " I made that"