The Brew Bag Blog — efficiency of beer

This was my first AHA national conference, but it won't be my last. I left Grand Rapids with so much information to assimilate that I put it on a schedule. I assume that the BOD knows that the braintrust of speaker intellect would compel home brewers to react to all the information they absorbed, and then experiment to an even greater degree, as they seek to  create both unique and common beers that exemplify the pursuit of a great brew. Eventually, craft beer lovers worldwide will be the recipients of it all when they tip future brews that have been influenced...

There are some misconceptions in the home beer brewing culture that lead me to write this post. Efficiency is a simple term in brewer's lingo. It means the degree to which the starch in grain, with the help of enzymes, is converted to sugar(s) during the grain mash and transferred into the boil kettle. The explanation of the conversion of starches to fermentable sugars is very complicated and involves PH, water temperature, and enzymatic hydrolysis. I won't go any further on this ( because I don't know much more), but will say that all brewers key in on this term...

In a recent article discussing different methods of brewing, the author differentiated "all-grain" from Brew In A Bag. I had to read the sentence twice. BIAB does not use extract, does not come in a kit, (although Brewer's Best is now offering six BIAB kits that include the hops, grain, priming sugar, yeast, and caps) and utilizes the same mashing schedule as the "all grain" method. Now here's the kicker - to make beer using a brew bag you start with grain, that's right, BIAB uses nuttin but grain! I'll tell you what's happening across the USA - new and...

The utilization is influenced by the vigor of the boil, the total gravity of the boil, the time of the boil and several other minor factors. The vigor of the boil can be considered a constant for each individual brewer, but between brewers there probably is some variation. The gravity of the boil is significant because the higher the malt sugar content of a wort, the less room there is for isomerized alpha acids. The strongest bittering factors are the total amount of alpha acids you added to the wort, and the amount of time in the boil for isomerization. Understandably then, most equations for IBUs work with these three variables (gravity, amount, and time) against a nominal utilization. As mentioned earlier, the utilization for alpha acids in homebrewing is generally accepted as topping out at about 30%.

http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter5-4.html

Why, yes Wilbur, there can be too much water in the mash tun. But can there be too little as well? Let's start by listing the ways wort can get into the boil kettle. In no significant order: 1. Batch sparging - mashing at water too grain ratios of ~1.25 per pound and then adding water in large batches to rinse the wort into the boil kettle - faster than fly sparging - no arm or pump needed.  2. Fly Sparging - a spinning arm held above the wort delivers water in an even composition so as to gently wash...