Batch Yield

[jebzter]

We are getting to a point where it is time to attack some sources of lost efficiency in our operations, but would like to get a handle on what other breweries are seeing as far as final yield/ batch goes. What we are experiencing is about a 15-25% loss throughout the process. Higher losses are experienced by beers with more hops in the kettle or ones that are dry hopped. We do not filter or use any separation technology at this time. Where are you seeing your largest losses, from kettle to fv, fv to bbt or bbt to keg? What is your average loss for a high hop usage ale vs a low hop usage ale? And if you have gone through this before, what things did you use to decrease loss and on average how much did you gain back?

[Swags]

Kettle hop dam

Our kettle has a conical bottom so we are able to use a hop dam and draw the final 120 gallons off the bottom outlet. We leave very little wort in the kettle.

Going the opposite way, My mash efficiency is less than 80% so I'd like to hear a few tips to increase. I seem to dump a lot of low gravity wort that does not go into the kettle per beersmith calculations.

[Crosley]

I am having the same problems so I am very interested to hear everyone's advice.
Swags-do you have any more info on this hop dam or some pics. I have a horrible time at not leaving gallons in the kettle.

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[FourSonsBrewing]

We have been averaging about 85% yield, but am also in the process of improving that. Our process has been to stop the sparge when we get ~12BBL in the kettle (10BBL system), after the boil were ~11BBL. Usually get a good hard pack in the whirlpool and am able to transfer ~95% of the wort in the kettle. We fine in the fv's, so after that is all finished we rack to the BBT and keg everything we transferred. We usually have the racking arm at about horizontal to get clear beer (so probably leaving behind about 1BBL in the fv. This usually yields us 17-18 kegs, little less in our IIPA.

I have noticed however that when filling up my new 30BBL fvs for the first time (triple batches), there was a good 18" of empty space in the fv, so I'm beginning to sparge a little more into my kettle to improve my yield.

[Bainbridge]

Go through every step of the process and think about three things:

- Are we losing beer here?
- Why are we doing what is causing us to lose beer?
- Is there a better way we can do this, some change we can make?

If you find that you are losing beer, but there's a good reason, or the loss is minimal, then it's fine. But you might think "Hey, maybe if we hooked up this and did this..." you can salvage some beer. Like for example, the wort or beer in your transfer hoses. Can you push it around with sterile water, co2, o2, etc? A long hose can have a gallon or two of wort in it. Every little bit helps.

The Mash. Check your mill settings. Get a shaker pan and shake shake shake, shake your barley! There's a thread on here about that. Work on finding the ideal liquor to grist ratio, vorlauf time and speed, lautering speed, sparge water amount, underlet water, and all the other things to make your mash tun kick some ass.

High Gravity Brewing. Can adding an additional bag or two into the mash and kettling up near the end of the boil net you an extra half-barrel or two with almost no additional expense or effort? We've been able to regularly pull 21 bbls of our kolsch out of a 20bbl run on a 25bbl total volume fermenter, final, filtered, kegged volume. And that's not even really hardcore high gravity brewing.

Trub. This one is more for big hoppy beers. Can you remove hops from of the kettle somehow? Use higher alpha hops for bittering. Use 150gm AA Co2 Hop Extract to bitter your double IPA, and pellets for aroma and flavor. Resin will save you five pounds of bittering hops per can out of your trub pile right there. Put in a trub gate in your kettle if you don't have one already. Work on your whirlpool technique to get the tightest, most centralized cone you can. Work on your lautering technique to keep malt chunkies out of the kettle as much as you can. Run the wort through a hopback and use hops to help filter some of the trub from the final wort. All these things are pretty easy to do.

Filtering. Better beer, more and faster. The extra yield you get out of the chundery layer near the bottom of the cone pays for the cost of the filter and media, and the whole batch is clear.

Blowoff and fermenter size. Course the more you fill a fermenter, the less head space you have. Too much and you can actually blow off a lot of your yeast at high krausen, which can cause attenuation issues. You might be able to cram 12bbls of wort in your 10bbl fermenter, but you'll blow a lot of it off. Fermcap and other anti-foam agents can help, a little. But there's a wort volume out there that will be ideal for your tanks, where you can get a reasonably maximal yield for each beer.