Crazy efficiency, sour mash and cereal mash Options

[Yeasty Boy]

Just wanted to share something I still can't quite figure out.
I was going to make a wit with 4# pils and 3# wheat flour, 1# oat flakes. Ended up getting another pound of pils and backing the oat to 10oz, adding 12oz flaked barley.
Sour mash using one pound of pils for about 40hr, cereal mash with flour and oat, and 6oz pils, then protein rest and sacch at 152 for almost 2hr (went out shopping.)
Thing is, I got a big 5.5g of 1.060 OG. It really can't be, so I'm guessing it was 4# flour, which is still something like 88% efficiency. Call it 5.25g and it's 84%, a little closer to reality. I normally get ~78% with normal beers. Now instead of a more normal wit at 1.052 I have this monster thing, not sure how the balance will come out. I have no doubt that the slow ramp for the cereal mash did some great hydrating, and the sour mash would've helped drop the pH, but I still can't quite grasp what happened. My hydro and refractometer both agreed.
If it turns out well, I may have to try and repeat the entire thing in the spring.
Anyone have any guesses or seen this sort of thing?

[BobH]

If you add more grain to your bill, half to three quarters pound total, you get 80% efficiency. So my guess would be you had a little more in there and or everything was very happy in the mash tun. Either way it's always nice to see gravity higher than experted when I'm done.

Bob

[Yeasty Boy]

Must've been something like that. But I have the receipt for 4# pilsner, and went back for one more pound, and I swear I weighed the 3# of flour before starting the cereal mash, and now I'm adding another pound just in my head to make sense of it, and getting the 84%. Fishy.

[BrewerGeorge]

White flour? I haven't trued it, but I'd bet that with the bran and germ removed it has a lot more potential extract than whole wheat. It should also be quite a bit more available to hydrate than typical cracked grain. I wouldn't be surprised if you got close to 100% conversion from the flour, which would be around 168 points from 4 pounds instead of 120 or so from wheat malt. That alone would be enough to raise the OG of a 5 gallon batch by about 9 points.

[Yeasty Boy]

Well, that is a more preferable answer than me going crazy, George. Only way to know is to try again. I'll play around with the original recipe calculations, up'ing the p.e. of the flour to match and see if that looks reasonable.
The cereal mash wasn't very difficult really, especially since I do a decoction about half the time; I'm used to stirring and waiting. Wheat flour is dirt cheap.
(Hmmm, what other classic styles could I use wheat flour in? Seems like wit is about the only one. Oh, and Saison.)

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I'd need 48 points per pound per gallon at 100% to make my original 3# work with 80% eff from the malt.
That is at least feasible. Think I'll go with that for now.

This post has been edited by Yeasty Boy: Nov 1 2008, 01:33 PM

[Stuster]

Sounds like George has found a plausible reason. I'm more interested in the fact that you used flour for your wit. Was it just a standard cereal mash? How easy was it to use flour in that? Does it turn out any different to unmalted wheat in the end (assuming you've used it before). I'm very interested as I've always got large bags of flour around for bread making and as you say it's far cheaper than unmalted wheat. (IMG:style_emoticons/brewboard/biggrin.gif)

[Yeasty Boy]

I've never used malted wheat in a wit. I save that for hefe's.
[from BJCP guidelines:]
"Ingredients: About 50% unmalted wheat (traditionally soft white winter wheat) and 50% pale barley malt (usually Pils malt) constitute the grist. In some versions, up to 5-10% raw oats may be used. Spices of freshly-ground coriander and Curaçao or sometimes sweet orange peel complement the sweet aroma and are quite characteristic. Other spices (e.g., chamomile, cumin, cinnamon, Grains of Paradise) may be used for complexity but are much less prominent. Ale yeast prone to the production of mild, spicy flavors is very characteristic. In some instances a very limited lactic fermentation, or the actual addition of lactic acid, is done."

The cereal mash was pretty simple, just ~8% pilsner and the rest flour, 1.25:1 water, slowly heating to 150, even slower up to 160, then added more water to about 1.5:1 and brought to boil. Dropped in the main mash for protein rest, went from there. I use rice hulls so the lauter was no big deal.