5% Better Brewer!

When you are an all grain brewer, besides trying to make tasty beer, you are also judged on how well you convert starches to sugars. This is know as your brewhouse efficiency. According to Brad Smith over at BeerSmith, "Brewhouse efficiency is defined as the percent of potential grain sugars that are converted into sugar in the wort."  I'm not going to reinvent the wheel by writing about efficiency but if you want to learn more about it, here are some resources.

BeerSmith
How to Brew

I've historically averaged around 65% efficiency by batch sparging. There have been some batches I've been in closer to 70% and some in the upper 50%.....yes, all over the place! I've been closer to 55%-60% my last few batches and I was starting to talk to some fellow brewers about it. They were also seeing some lower efficiencies and we found the common link was where we got our grains. It appeared that our local homebrew shop was just not giving a good crush (note: last time I was there I looked at the gap on their mill and I think I could fit my wife's mini van through it!). So with post Christmas money/gift cards I decided to buy a mill. 

I opted to go with the Monster Mill MM3. Really nice mill. I'd highly recommend it. On the maiden grind before my last brew I ground 1 lb of my grain bill to see how it worked. And right away I noticed how much finer the crush was compared to what I was getting from the store. I have my mill set at 0.045" gap.

I ground the rest of the grain and I went through my mash process as usual. At the end of the brew day I calculated my efficiency and it was up to 70%. This is the best mash I've had in a while. Yes, it was only 1 test so far and I know 70% isn't wonderful but its a step in the right direction. I'm very hopefully that I can be more consistent now that I'm grinding my own grains. I plan to do a few more batches at the current gap setting and then start to mess with it to see how it impacts my efficiency.

Not so Robust, but Pretty Brown.

A few weeks ago I posted about a Porter I brewed. I think the beer came out well and folks who've tried it have enjoyed it. But its not as robust as I expected based on a previously batch. The first time I made this beer it was pretty roasty and even borderline stoutish. As it aged the roastiness faded some and it became a truer robust porter. A nice beer overall.

To compensate for some of that roastiness this last batch, I decided to add the roasted grains toward the end of my mash to extract the color but maybe not as much roastiness. Mission accomplished. However, I don't believe I have a robust porter anymore.

I plan to enter this beer in my club's next competition . To see if it fit the Robust Porter category, I did a side by side comparision with Smuttynose's Robust Porter. Right off the bat, I can smell that the Smuttynose was much roastier. The head was also much tanner even though the color of the beer was near identiccal. To the BJCP guidelines I went.

On reading the Robust Porter guidelines it was clear to me I should not enter this beer as a Robust Porter. The Brown Porter guidelines though seemed very close. In reading the Comments section of the Brown Porter, it actually highlighted the differences I was seeing in the two beers side by side.

I've learned two very important things from this batch of beer.

1. Minor tweeks in your mash schedule can have signficant impacts especially when using dark grains.
2. If entering a competition, be sure to enter a beer into the category of the style the beer finished as, not as the style it was intended .

Having judged several competition, I've seen how people ignore #2 because of either, not knowing, not caring or just being flat out being stubborn since they planned their beer to be a certain style. I've put in the comments section, "would be better in 'X' style category". I've seen it in Porters and with IPAs. Either the Porters are more brown than robust (like in my case) or the IPA's come up short on hop aroma (maybe Pale Ale vs. IPA?).

I know if I entered this beer as a robust porter I'd get dinged for not being roasty enough. So as a competition tip, enter your beer in the category the finished beer as, not in the style you may have intended to brew. Some categories have fine line.