Increasing efficiency....

Did a step mash last night because my all grain big abv beer batches have been 66-68%.



Attained 75% for the first time but it added another hour to my 5 hour schedule for brewing big abv beers.



I feel I could have ground the malt finer, sparged/lautered another 15 minutes on top of the 40 I made it happen in, and I do to know what else.



Any tips for the home brewing nut for increasing efficiency would be greatly appreciated



Cheers

Try fly sparging till you’re at a gravity reading of about 1.010
coming out of your mash

How big of ABV beers are you getting 67% on?

I’d definitely recommend checking the mill setting. I’m not sure what my Barleycrusher is set at, but I get around 72-75% efficiency with batch sparging even when doing up to 9% beers.

What’s your mash tun setup?

Ya for that to happen I would need a vessel twice as big as I have to boil in and then would have to boil longer than 90 minutes. I have never had a stuck runoff, possibly grind finer?

67% mash efficiency? I usually get around 70% brewhouse efficiency and somewhere around 85% mash efficiency with a coleman cooler and batch sparging. I have a copper manifold, not sure if that makes a difference, I use a relatively fine grind, mash for about 40-45 minutes, mash out (bring the whole thing up to about 165 to dissolve more sugar). When doing big beers, I’ll often cut my sparge water into two batch sparges, that seems to help as well.

My setup runs as follows. Lauter vessel 8.5 gal pot, mash vessel 10 gal pot, boil vessel 10 gal pot. Can’t run more than 25 lbs of grain

I recently have started step mashing vs single mash infusions it takes longer but works better

My advice: grind until you’re scared.

Do you stir the mash? What is your water/grain ratio?

Originally posted by Cobra
My advice: grind until you’re scared.

Use 5.2

Originally posted by stumpyiliz
Did a step mash last night because my all grain big abv beer batches have been 66-68%.



Attained 75% for the first time but it added another hour to my 5 hour schedule for brewing big abv beers.



I feel I could have ground the malt finer, sparged/lautered another 15 minutes on top of the 40 I made it happen in, and I do to know what else.



Any tips for the home brewing nut for increasing efficiency would be greatly appreciated



Cheers