by warra48 » Wednesday Aug 25, 2010 7:01 am
And that's one of the problems with a lot of brewing lingo. There are really no definitive definitions of what some of these terms mean.
For example, brewhouse efficiency means different things to different people, and different things in different brewing programs.
Having said that, I venture to say that when we talk about efficiency, we mostly mean "mash" or"extraction" efficiency. For us, that's probably the most comparable, as it has the least variances from brewer to brewer in the process. Once we go further down the brewing process, we introduce losses to trub, evaporation losses etc, which will vary from set up to set up. The use of mash or extraction efficiency also allows us to use other brewers recipes more reliably, because we have to tweak them less to fit our normal outcomes, although I tend to mostly design my own recipes.
I use BeerSmith for my recipe design and calculations, and my record keeping.
It doesn't really matter on a HB scale whether we use 4.5 or 4.8 kg of grains, for example, to achieve a result. The cost differential to us is minimal.
It is different on a commercial scale but, hey, this is a "homebrew" forum, not a commercial brewing forum, so lets keep things in perspective.
As already pointed out by DrS, what matters most to us as homebrewers is consistency. If we can achieve efficiency in the same range, then it introduces dependency in our processes, allowing us to produce beers as we designed them. We are not after the best achievable efficiency, but consistency.
Last edited by
warra48 on Wednesday Aug 25, 2010 11:48 am, edited 1 time in total.