Quick Tip: Better All-Grain Efficiency is not Always Better

All-grain efficiency is all the rage. People always seem to want to squeeze as much fermentables out of their system as possible, with efficiencies running 85% or more.

Much more important than high efficiency, though, is consistent efficiency. This allows a homebrewer to formulate recipes without guessing what efficiency to calculate them at. Even if a efficiency is low, it is better if it is consistently low. As homebrewers, the amount of grain that needs to be added to make up for lower efficiency amounts to maybe a dollar or two per batch.

In addition, one of the issues that can result from pushing the sparge too much to boost efficiency is that one runs the risk of the runoff going below 1.010 SG. If this happens, the brewer can extract tannins from the grain husks. There is a reason the brewing software like ProMash sets their extract efficiency at 75%.