Calculating brewhouse efficiency

[Fal]

I'm using my new all grain set up for the first time. How do I calculate my efficiency for recipes?

[pob]

Firstly: Record everything. All water volumes & temps. All gravity readings (pre-, post-boil & later post-ferment).
Once you have these you can calculate your figures over a beer once cleanup is done.
There are quite a few calculators online or if you're using Beersmith, you can fill in as you go along.

To prevent worry & hassle, do your homework beforehand. Speak (or ask) to someone who has similar equipment to give you your base starting points. You can fine tune as you brew further batches.
Water volumes are necessary to work out: trub loss, boil off volume & grain absorption.

Gravity will let you know how well your mash has converted.

Best of luck & keep asking here.
Are you near any of the local clubs? Any of them will be a wealth of info that they'll be happy to share & help you with.

[bier]

In my opinion brew house efficiency is not so important for home brewing. What you should be focusing on more is Mash efficiency and other measurements such as boil off rate etc.

Brew house efficiency is more important in commercial brewing where they need to calculate costs etc.

If you lose a litre to trub etc I don't really care as much. More important is to hit your target OG.

[Fal]

Thanks, for the advise.unfortionatly I'm a few hours from the nearest club. I use the beersmith app, but I'll admit it's a bit confusing.

Maybe I was wrong about brewhouse Effiiency. What I'm after is the Effiiency percentage to use when calculating my recipie and the expected OG.  Is that the mash Effiency? How do I calculate that?

[Leann ull]

Put up what you find confusing and we can educate everybody
It took me ages to get 100% usage out of it but that's cos I'm really fick

[Fal]

At the mo, I'm just trying to get basic use out of it. But I think the difficulty is there is so many options like trying to add my equipment profile, which was a feat in itself!

[molc]

Beersmith uses brewhouse effeciency which is mash effeciency plus losses factored in. To setup, you need to work out your mash effiency and enter your trub loss for the kettle. Then, tweak the % until you see 70% come up for mash effeciency on the mash screen. It's a middle of the road starting point.

After that, keep records and you can dial in with your measured values.

[Beermonger]

Something that might be confusing is that, although the mash efficiency in BeerSmith should change when you put in the brewhouse efficiency, on my version at least nothing happens until I click on another tab (e.g., 'starter' or 'volumes') and then go back to the main recipe tab. Only then does it update.

Couldn't figure that out for a while.