Brewhouse Efficiency

Hello brewers, how do we decide what figure we should adjust  the Brewhouse / Total Eff to. I have all my Measurements / losses dialled in but I just can't get the brewhouse Eff sorted. The last brew hit all the estimates so I thought I had it sorted. So I tried an import recipe from cloud and it missed all the targets big time.
Do we adjust Brewhouse Eff in the equipment profile  until the measured gravities  meet the estimated gravities?
Its a bit of a problem when the programme  seems to work from the B/H Eff to estimate gravities but is such a pain in the butt to get it set up.
I mash in a bag in a stock pot and sparge with the rest of the water to bring me up to boil volume (13 litres total)  So my losses are just boil off, boil turb,  shrink% and fermenter. So you would think Brewhouse Eff should be easy to find. Please can someone tell me how to do this its driving me crazy.         

Brewhouse Efficiency is the total percentage of sugar that makes it into the FERMENTER from the total percentage of sugar AVAILABLE.

Mash efficiency is what you get from the grain into the kettle. That's where you calculate your preboil gravity. That's the first deduction from the total potential available.

When you have losses from Trub and other equipment after the boil, you reduce the percentage of sugar that gets to the fermenter. In other words, the percentage of volume lost in transfer is the same percentage that should be applied to reduce from mash efficiency.

So, if you tell BeerSmith that you get 70% Brewhouse Efficiency, then no matter what the volume, BeerSmith will show you 70% of the sugar available as the gravity prediction. When you add loss to Trub, the ONLY place that volume can gain its' sugar is from increasing the mash efficiency. Eventually, BeerSmith will show more than 100% mash efficiency, which means you're over estimating the Brewhouse Efficiency.

Roosterbrews said:

Do we adjust Brewhouse Eff in the equipment profile  until the measured gravities  meet the estimated gravities?

Its a bit of a problem when the programme  seems to work from the B/H Eff to estimate gravities but is such a pain in the butt to get it set up.
     

Click to expand...

Yes, adjusting the brewhouse efficiency until the numbers match is one way to go about it.  I measure the critical parameters as I see them:  Water in, grains in, pre-boil wort, pre-boil gravity, post boil volume, post boil gravity.  From these I calculate the grain absorption,  mash/lauter efficiency, and boil off rate and can use these figures averaged over a number of brews to dial in my equipment profiles.  It kind of works and I will elaborate why.

My mash efficiency is pretty stable for the majority of the brews that I make.  High adjunct brews and very high gravity brews suffer a little bit.  My brewhouse efficiency can be all over the place depending upon the recipe.  Highly hopped recipes tend to have greater amount of trub left over and this is scalable based upon the total amount of hops added during the boil/whirlpool-steeping operation. 

So, I end up plugging in what I expect for a trub loss and then recalculating the brewhouse efficiency based to achieve the mash efficiency that I know that I will hit.  Since my starting profile is an average of many recipes, it creates a median point so the adjustments are not usually low.