What is your brewhouse efficiency trend?

75-80 on beers under 6.5 abv.
Over that it's more like 60-65

 

No sparge 65% for above 6 percent
70 percent for below 5 percent.
Just lowered my crush on my last brew and got 75 percent but that is an outlier until I brew again and recreate it.

 

75%-80% up to 20° Plato SG. It starts to dip heavily past that...

 

I do BIAB with a dunk sparge which allows me to stir well every 10 minutes of the mash and not worry about doing a vorlauf or having a stuck sparge. I can then squeeze the bag like it owes me money. I pretty much get all the grain has to give. For these reasons my numbers may not be comparable. I get 83-85% on pretty much every beer with an OG of 1.065 or under. Bigger beers have been 70-72% but I don’t do enough of those to be able to say that is a consistent percentage.

 

big beers are overrated

 

Big beers are under appreciated

 

Excellent observation, which I have noticed myself as well and account for it when planning the brew day. My trend is about identical to yours except approximately 10-15% higher, ranging from about 85% on average at low ABV to 65% at very high ABV. Crush harder and you can get there... but at the expense of occasional stuck runoff.

 

I do the same -- dunk sparge BIAB -- but don't stir and don't squeeze. The dunk sparge improves efficiency a TON compared to not.

 

I fly sparge and get around 70% on beers
7-8% and around 64% on bigger beers. I rarely make beer below 7%

 

I buy my big beers cause aging big beers takes a long time and I don't want to drink a keg of 8-10 percent beer. It's a big risk in terms of time, material usage, and I'd have to bottle. I phrased what I meant incorrectly. I like big beers, I hate making them. Juice isn't worth the squeeze for me.

 

Are you guys measuring brew efficiency every time? I only measure when I'm changing my crush or I have a greatly missed target OG and then I check my next brew day. Seems like overkill to check every time.

 

I don’t measure every time. My process is always the same so that consistency makes my result the same. I also use my own recipes and crush my own grain immediately before dough-in for still more consistency. I also don’t sweat it if a beer is supposed to be 1.060 and I get 1.058 or 1.062.

 

I intended to to plot the brewhouse efficiency from all my batches in excel and plot a line of best fit that would give me a pretty good estimate of my brewhouse from 3.5 to about 12% beers. Haven't gotten around to it, but this thread may inspire me to get it done.

 

Here's mine. Been tracking it for 10 years.

 

Those 90s are very impressive

 

@Prep8611 oh dam I thought when you came to Vermont we'd split a batch of 10%, lol.

I love making big beers for the reasons you don't. Ageing, extra ingredients, sampling over 1 year or more all add to the pagentry.

 

I should always provide the following asterisk:

* My efficiency is higher than average because I am a small batch brewer of 2-2.5 gallons, so boiloff rate tends to be 24-32%, so I can sparge a hell of a lot more than the rest of ya's, thus capturing more sugars per unit weight of grain. If you want to improve efficiency, moving to smaller batches is yet-another way to accomplish it.

Cheers.