Notice he says trub loss which includes gravity points and volume. He acknowledges in writing that trub loss includes gravity points yet when you tell the program you have trub loss it only increases the water, not the grain.
Hi Bob,
Mash Efficiency: The sum of conversion efficiency and sparge efficiency into the kettle.
Brewhouse Efficiency: The percentage of total sugar that makes it into the fermenter.
With brewhouse efficiency, if you say you'll get 80% efficiency, you're saying; of the total sugar available, even with losses, that's how much gets to the fermenter. That means that if you add losses to trub, you still have 80% going to the fermenter and will maintain the same gravity. Therefore, the ONLY place you can gain that sugar is with increased Mash Efficiency.
The only way to correctly use this program as-is would be to enter zero for trub loss and shoot for the volume you want in the kettle at the end of the boil (after shrinkage from cooling). Period. Not some hack whereby you makeup a total efficiency to hide the error.
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The only variable in the whole process is how well you can extract the sugar out of the grain. That's the percentage we should be entering.
In the first part, you're establishing your mash efficiency.
The next step is to measure the fermenter volume and the resulting gravity. This represents two percentages:
1) The percent of usable wort from the kettle.
2) The percent of available grain sugar that can become beer.
The percentage is a reduction from the mash efficiency. However, if you overstate your sugar content you end up making the statement that you get more extraction from your grain. If that isn't the case, then your percentage of total sugar into the fermenter must go down.
What you'll find is that differing recipes will have different yields into the fermenter. So, if the target is to always have 5.5 gallons in the fermenter, then you must accommodate the loss, somehow. A Pilsner will have a greater brewhouse efficiency than a DIPA. Without adjusting for the hop loss, the two recipes will have identical kettle volumes, but very different amounts in the fermenter.
Brewhouse efficiency is more important in commercial brewing than in homebrewing because they need to have predictable yields to sell. It's a lot more effective use of equipment and labor to adjust a recipe by adjusting for brewhouse efficiency than to brew a second batch to make up the yield.
After that it is all predetermined by simple ratios that can be applied to the adjusted mash efficiency. That is the only thing that makes sense to me.
And, you know how to make BeerSmith do that. In other words, you will always have a predictable kettle volume, but your batch yield will be different. That's a perfectly valid way to run your brewery. Yet, if having a predictable yield into the fermenter and ultimately the keg is important, then brewhouse efficiency is going to need to be your method.
It is just plain wrong for the program to tell you to add water to your recipe without a proportional increase in grain.
Well, no. The brewer has made the statement that XX% of all sugars will get to the kettle with that grist. Adding or subtracting trub loss doesn't change that statement because mash efficiency is what gets adjusted to maintain the gravity. If it's diluted, then it's up to the brewer to adjust the efficiency percentage down to accommodate the additional volume or to adjust the grist. The third remedy is to adjust the batch volume down. The program doesn't assume which is correct for the brewer.
Say I want to make a batch of cookies. I want 24 cookies so I decide to make a batch of 24 cookies worth of dough. But I know that 4 cookies worth of dough will stick to the sides of my bowl. So if I want to end up with 24 cookies in the oven I need 4 more cookies worth of dough.
This example is measuring the cookie count yield to the bowl and to the oven. The bowl efficiency is 100%, but the oven efficiency is 83%. Change the cookie count to quarts, and you've illustrated brewhouse efficiency.
The difference is when you back that up to the sacks of flower and sugar. How much of THAT total potential makes it to the oven? If there is flower and sugar that can't get into the bowl to begin with, then you already have and efficiency loss from the total potential. That's what brewhouse efficiency is measuring; your sack potential.
Since there seems to be so much disagreement on this perhaps the s/w could accommodate both sides and provide the option to [use mash efficiency].
Brad has said that the option to be mash efficiency driven is on the list of planned updates. However, updates to the numerous mobile platforms, podcasts and articles are using enough of his time that this update hasn't happened for years.
