A Lesson on Efficiency

An area that has perplexed me a bit in brewing is the term "efficiency".  I have heard some people throwing out numbers like 70%, or 80%, even as high as 95%!   I built an Electric Brewery system where the designer claimed to be getting very high efficiencies, in the 95% area.  I figured as I have the same equipment, any deviation from that would be surrounding my techniques.

One of the other great mysteries to me about efficiency is what my software was telling me.  My iPad software iBrewmaster asks you to enter your system's efficiency, then when the brew day is over and actual numbers are in, it calculates the actual efficiency.  I was doing great to hit 85%, pretty far off the 95%.

Then I started to use Beersmith2, and wait a minute, what is this "mash efficiency" it is talking about?  A picture is starting to form here, that maybe there are multiple measure points of efficiency.  By chance a great thread started on the Electric Brewery forums which discussed exactly this topic.  Turns out other people were wondering the same, and out of this some clarity surfaced.  You'll have to look past some of the frustrated posts made at one point, but after that some of the real figuring out of the calculations take place.

http://www.theelectricbrewery.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=26250

Posted within this thread is a great article from Brewer's Friend:

http://www.brewersfriend.com/2012/11/30/making-sense-of-efficiency-definitions/

After reading through these, some things started making more sense.  Back around Batch #9 I started making only 5 gallons batches.  Making 10 gallons each time was leaving a lot of experimental brew left over at times, so while experimenting doing 5 gallon batches made more sense.  If you notice in Batch #9 I started hitting bad gravity numbers.  I went through everything thinking I was making mistakes in process, I even found out that the Cargill grains I switched to had a lower diastic power, however with these reads the clarity finally hit.

Going to 5 gallon batches changed my brewhouse efficiency %.  It was as easy as that.  Since there is trub and wort left in the boil kettle after transfer to carboy, as well as wort in the chiller and hoses, that volume does not change between 5 gallon and 10 gallon batches.  However as a percentage, against a 5 gallon batch it is a higher percentage.  With that said, that reduces the overall percentage of efficiency the entire brewhouse is getting.

So what is the point of all of this?  The goal is if you have a good understanding of these numbers, you can more effectively use these software tools.  This will allow for more consistent brews and hitting your target numbers.  Well fact is if you brew the same recipe over and over, you would iron out the recipe over time to become consistent.  However if you are bouncing around a lot doing different recipes as I have been lately, then understanding efficiency is important because the only constant is the equipment.

I am probably not done learning this dynamic.  I'm sure there are many other aspects to fully understand, but I at least feel like I've learned and figured out something pretty big.