Brewhouse (in)efficiency

I'm a little surprised you need to add acid at all for a stout. Is your water extremely alkaline? FWIW, I like to target about 5.5 for stouts and other dark, malty beers.

 

Ditto. I use baking soda in my stouts to bring pH up. Never add acid. And my water is very alkaline.

 

Yeah it'd be shocking if you needed to lower PH with all the dark malts needed in a stout. I tend to use pickling lime to raise my ph.

 

If you'd like, pm me your grain bill, water profile, and strike water volume. I could verify with another model.

 

Maybe you are mashing at a high temp using a low Ph wich is the opposite way to get better convertion. Higher mashing temp needs of higher Ph values to get better preformance of the encymatic action and vice-versa.

 

Okay...... it's got to be one of these things then:

1) Are your volume measurements exactly in line with your brewing software, pre and post boil? And...
2) Are you collecting every drop of wort out of the mash tun? If not, you are wasting sugar.
3) Is there a lot of dead space under the false bottom?
4) Have you calibrated your hydrometer very recently?
5) Do you calibrate your pH meter with each and every use?

It's one or more of the above things.

 

It is not the sodium.

Looks like you've wasted almost a gallon of good wort. My advice is to collect all this volume and even add in the middle of the boil if necessary so as not to waste all these extra sugars. There's your lost efficiency.

 

If you can't find the source of your problem, then you may just have to pony up $1 or $2 more in grain and be done with it. I am often at 68% brewhouse efficiency for beers in the 5-6% range... 64% is common for 7%ish beers and it continues to drop as the OG goes up.

Confirm your mash and sparge volumes (weight is a great way if you have scale capacity, 8.34lb per gallon of water). Record your pre-boil and post-boil gravity... Refine in your boil off rates (mine is .8 gal/hr compared to the default over a gallon I believe) and all that in beer smith. It takes a few batches, but eventually you tune in your system. Consistency is what you want, don't worry too much about trying to hit numbers other people can in terms of brew house efficiency, no need to.

 

You can if you want, but you shouldn't need to. If you can drain every drop out of the mash, then you won't need to use as much strike water up front, and thus wouldn't need to boil longer or harder to get the same final volume. But if you want to just live with the losses and not change your process, then yes, you can improve efficiency by collecting more sparge and boiling a little longer or harder. Either way will work.

That, of course, is a third option. Just assume your efficiency is less than it used to be, and design your recipes with more grains accordingly.

 

88 ppm sodium isn't a problem in itself. It can actually accentuate sweet flavors. But high sodium (which is in the water as a positively charged cation) means that there will be relatively less Calcium and Magnesium (also cations) to balance the negatively charged carbonates/bicarbonates (anions). Calcium and Magnesium lower the mash pH (by reacting with phosphates from the malt, releasing H+ into the mash), so if you don't have much Ca/Mg, but do have a lot of alkalinity (bicarbonates/carbonates), the residual alkalinity (and pH) of the mash will tend to be high. All of that is to say that sodium doesn't impact mash pH directly, but it does indirectly.

 

Too late to edit, so I'll add in a reply... to clarify, I really should have said "...it can indirectly." Sodium could also be balancing against Chlorides (for example), in which case there's no impact to alkalinity or pH from the Sodium/Chloride combo.

 

Today i played around to see if i could increase my efficiency because i also had some batches come out 10-12 points lower and was able to come 2 points from my target. Besides grain crush and ph i did a few changes. Add a silicon hose to dip tube that touches the bottom. I use a coldbreak false bottom that sits above the drain.Mashed at 147 for 90-100 mins instead of 60. Let the mashout sit for 20 mins instead of 10. Also mixed the grains more then usual.

 

Double check the mill sides. I know of an instance where the sides of the mill (next to the rollers) are made of masonite and they were getting pushed out and letting unmilled grain pass.