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Water to Grain Volume's and Mash Efficiency

Ushman92

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Hello,

So when reading I see that you want to keep your water/grain ratio while mashing to about 1-2qt's per lb of grain. I was planning on shooting for 1.5 as I typically do about 1.2 but after doing some research I see that people tend to get better efficiency with a little higher water/grain ratio (as long as your not exceeding 2qt/lb).

But I use coolers... and I have to do an infusion mashout. When doing this, this obviously increases the water to grain ratio by quite a bit. If I shoot for the 1.5 ratio for mash like I wish, then with the mashout infusion im at a total of 2.5qt/lb of grain. If I aim for about 1.2qt/lb of grain then after my mashout infusion I would be just over 2.

So my question... Do I need to keep in mind my water/grain ratio after mashout infusion, or does the volume not matter too much during mashout? I just need to figure out what will result in best efficiency.
 
The critical water to grain ratio is for the initial mash step.  You don't need to conform to it on successive steps.

Having said that, I do full volume BIAB and regularly have a water to grain ratio above 3 qts/lb without negative results.  When I do drag out my mash tun and do a standard mash with sparge, I use a water to grain ratio of around 1.6 qts/lb for the initial infusion as this gives me enough water in the sparge to get equal runnings between the initial run off and the sparge extraction.  This tends to maximize efficiency, though the drop off is not really steep if you are not exactly even runnings.
 
You're way overthinking a non-critical aspect of brewing ;)

shoot for anywhere between "nuff water to cover it all" and Full volume which can easily hit 3q/lb

spend more of your efforts worrying about proper mash temps. Adding a RIMs or HERMs unit to your cooler and a pump to circulate, as well as switching to fly sparging (assuming you're batch sparging) will give you far better results.

proper grain crush, conditioning the grain, millions of things that from my experience have far more noticeable changes than the water/grain ratio.
 
the water/grain ratio can also change whether you are doing a batch or fly sparge. When batch sparging I like to have nearly equal amounts of water for the initial mash and the sparge. For fly sparging I don't have a set amount of water between the mash and the sparge but I do keep an eye on how much water I will need for the sparge. I don't want too little and risk not rinsing all the sugars out of the mash. I determine that more by feel than anything.

You can change the water to grain ratio in your Beersmith recipes by opening one (or when making one from scratch) then going to the mash tab. Making sure you have selected the appropriate mash technique of course. Then double click on the primary mash step and there will be a box whee you can specify the exact water to grain ratio you want for that recipe. The default is 1.25 qts per pound but if you regularly use a different ratio, say 1.5 qts per pound, you could change that in the mash profiles tools. To preserve the default I would copy the profile you want... paste that profile in the same window and then work on the copy to create your custom mash profile. Be sure to give it a different name like "Ushman92's (insert mash type here) Mash".

 
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