I ordered some malt and hops from the LHBS which someone else picked up for me. Without asking, they crushed it for me which would be ok if they're mill didn't suck, or at least the gap on their mill didn't suck. Can I re-crush with my Barley Crusher or will I mash the husks up too bad? I've re-crushed with a rolling pin before with no obvious ill-effects.

I'd recrush it. You'll be fine.

Doug

I'd recrush also. But keep the speed down so you don't cause the broken husks to turn into flakes.

I've double crushed grain with out any noticable problems.

Yes, go for it............

CLB

Thanks for the reassurance. It's only two pounds so I was going to hand crank anyway.

Double crush - KHB's mill is notorious for poor efficiency results. Before I had a BC, I used to tell KHB to crush the grain like it stole something from them, they would give me the whole tannins speech and stuck this and that, blah, blah...

Then the Barley Crusher came - and that was the end of the LHBS crush....

I'm considering hand-cranking all my grains from now on no matter how much. I'm still not convinced that drill-driven the mill is as efficient.

Why wouldn't it be? FWIW, Dan Listermann has said that the faster the rollers turn, the greater the shear angle and the finer the crush. The finer the crush, the greater the efficiency. I use a drill to drive my mill and certainly haven't found it to have a negative effect on efficiency.

Denny, I felt sure you would respond... I also think it may be a result of my tun geometry and type of hose setup. I've been playing with it as far as crush and I'm wondering if I'm getting some sort channelling down the sides. Also, I use a SS water-heater hose. Its diameter is about twice that of a regular braid hose but pretty short about 12". The tun is an Igloo Ice-cube so all dimensions are fairly equal. I'm not clear if this makes a difference as to how the bed filters vs the hose length. I'm thinking of getting more hose in order to cover more of the bottom of the tun.

And, For some reason I'm not getting any dough-balls no matter how fine I crush the grain (one pass). I used to get dough balls and would have to add the grain slowly in order to break them up. Now I can dump all of the grain in at once and no dough balls no matter how much grain. When I had dough-balls I had a greater efficiency it seems. I've gone from very hard water to quite soft water. Not sure if this has an effect on the grist sticking to itself thus a possible illusion of the crush not being as good.

I'm so confused I'm not sure if it is one thing or multiple factors. I get good effs, around 78-80% but I feel I could do better. I've never scaled up the grain as the TB sparging calculator suggests and used to get in the mid to high 80's in effs. So confused... Thanks.

If you batch sparge (and are doing it correctly) even if you are getting channeling it won't matter. The sugars are in solution so you're draining them, unlike fly sparging where you're rinsing them out of the grain. The wort only drains from the last couple inches of the braid near the outlet, so more braid won't drain more sugars. If you're getting 70-80% efficiency, what more do you need? It ain't a contest!

The only reason I switched to hand crank for these two pounds was that I didn't want to mash the husks up much more. I got about 77% or so which is good for me with a mash heavy on wheat. I think I need to increase water by a bit yet. Last night was better but the grain bed still went dry before I reached target runoff.