My efficiency yesterday blew so badly that I think I may have weighed out less malt than I thought. Anyway, I actually dumped a pound of malt extract in to get it up a few points. This let me hit a gravity of 54.3--14.0 Brix, whatever that works out to be. Of course, given that this was my first SIMRing, that may play an explanatory role. I'm worried that conversion never completed or something, but there's litte to be done about that now.

The grain to water ratio made a pretty thin mash. Could I have fucked up that measurement to the point that it made the mash inefficient? I used my old Phil's Lauter Tun set up to SIMR, and I usually use my keggle.

I'm going to go run a test real quick and I'll be right back.

--back--

Well, the test was to examine the amount of deadspace in the false bottom of my keggle. There was some hypothesis I had which required that the keggle deadspace be fairly large. It is not. In fact, it is smaller than I though--less than a quart.

I have a sudden and strong conviction that I should have mashed longer. I have this sudden worry that I'm mistaken to think that a short 15 minute rest in the 145 range is adequate because gelatinization won't occur until late enough in that stage that it really can't serve as an adequate beta-amylase rest. I think I will try my next beer for 30 minutes in each range because it seems like an easy data point to work with. Of course, given that my next beer will be a lager, I'm not sure how much I should really infer from the results.

Maybe I will do three beers in a row with 30-30 two-stage conversion rests. That would give me a much better basis to work from. After that I could move in either direction for the first rest and see what result I get.