Brew Session Efficiency Calculation

[Bell Pico]

Yesterday, I completed my first actual brew with Brewer's Friend and am confused about the pre-boil (and other) efficiency calculations in the Brew Log section. My pre-boil wort gravity was exactly as predicted by the recipe calculation but the efficiency result in the Brew Log section is not reasonable at 174%.

Below are screen shots of the calculation and result from the Brew Log. You can ignore the lower volume that went to the kettle; that was just me inadvertently leaving too much wort in the lauter tun.

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong here?

Thanks,

RDS

 

[Yooper]

Something is not entered correctly- can you link to the recipe (if it's shared), so I can see where the issue is?

 

[Bell Pico]

Hi Yooper,

Thanks for the quick response to this question. I’ve now shared the recipe and the link is below.

R


https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/728055/the-rehydrator-session-ipa

Something is not entered correctly- can you link to the recipe (if it's shared), so I can see where the issue is?

 

[Yooper]

I found it- if you look at the recipe you have 0 entered for the ppg of the base malt. Red Shed Bentley is entered, but 0 is entered for the amount of fermentables it would give. Since that's more than half of the recipe, your efficiency is only calculated on the amount of fermentables you have.

 

[Yooper]

You can "unshare" if you'd like to. I looked it over well, and can still answer any questions you may have.

 

[Hawkbox]

Are you meaning Red Shed Barley out of Alberta? Cause I could probably find those numbers for you reasonably quickly.

They're a relatively new malting place that as far as I know only sells in Alberta. Red Shed Malting.

 

[Bell Pico]

You can "unshare" if you'd like to. I looked it over well, and can still answer any questions you may have.

Thanks for finding the problem. I have corrected my inventory for this malt.

What appears to have confused me is that when I am in edit mode for the recipe, it shows a PPG of 42 for that malt even though I had 0 associated with that malt in my inventory. The recipe summary and brew session show a PPG of 0 (see screen shots below). If the recipe had not accounted for a value in this range, then my gravity would have been way out but it was dead on. The brew session was created directly from this recipe without any (intentional) edits.

Playing with another recipe, it appears that the software defaults to a PPG of 42 if 0 is entered in the inventory. Is this correct?

To Hawkbox, I appreciated the offer but I'll attempt to contact Red Shed about their specs since I currently have several of their malts.

R

 

[Hawkbox]

If you get them please share cause I use a lot of their Vienna style and just pick whatever is close in the options.

 

[Bell Pico]

I received the malt analysis below from Red Shed.

 

[KC]

Bentley isn't on there but your PPG should be 36-37. 42 is not a good default placeholder. You don't see extract % at 90 on a coarse grind.

 

[Bell Pico]

Thanks KC, I came to a similar conclusion. The Bentley base malt that I used came with a couple of specs: Friability of 87 and colour of 3.7 (not sure about the units of the latter, but assume them to be SRM.

 

[KC]

I made an assumption about Extract CG, but it has to be around 78%. Multiply by 46 to get PPG. Friability is a touch low for a 3° Pale, but okay.