A Guide To Mashing And Batch Sparging

[PistolPatch]

MASHING AND BATCH SPARGING

After brewing my first AG with Ross some time ago I wrote some notes on the process and some brewers miraculously found them to be of some help in lessening the bewilderment that often accompanies the tranistion to AG. At the time, Ross also did a fine job of pictorially describing the process. The following guide combines the notes and pictures.

Since writing these notes, brewing in a bag (BIAB) came about and it is an easier and, I think, more sensible way for people to get under way with AG. For example, it requires only one vessel instead of the three you will need to batch or fly sparge.

For those who are set up for or wish to know more about traditional brewing methods, I'm hoping though that the following may help to understand batch sparging which, after BIAB, is the next easiest way to start AG in my opinion. I only know the basics of fly sparging but maybe someone else could write a guide for beginners on fly sparging. It would certainly be of great interest to newer brewers.

WHY BATCH SPARGE?

Batch sparging is simple. It requires no complex equipment and very little monitoring compared with fly sparging. From what I gather, the only advantage of fly sparging is a slight increase in brewhouse efficiency. In other words, youll need a tad more grain for batch sparging to produce the same original gravity. So batch sparging may cost you a few cents more in grain.

I found the following info sent to me by a fellow AHBer very interesting...

I agree with you about batch sparging. I suppose the reasons why everyone doesn't do it are simply a) Homebrewing started by copying what the big guys do, and they fly sparge because all that dead space for the hot water addition costs money -- bigger mash tun, more brewery space -- and small differences in efficiency make a difference for them. And B) Even for us home brewers size requirement is a factor. So everyone simply tooled up for fly sparging from the start. It took a bit of lateral thinking on the part of whoever invented batch sparging. I think gradually homebrewers are switching over as and when they can upgrade to bigger mash tuns. I am certainly a convert. There is now the opportunity for new brewers such as yourself to just equip themselves for batch sparging from the outset.

HOW TO MASH AND BATCH SPARGE

1. Find a Recipe and Order the Grain Bill: Rosss Scwartzbier that we did on Wednesday had the following grain bill in the recipe


3.37 kg Munich Malt (9.0 SRM) 56.0 %

1.93 kg Pilsner, Malt Craft Export (Joe White) 32.0 %

0.24 kg Chocolate Malt (Joe White) (381.0 SRM) 4.0 %

0.24 kg Crystal, Dark (Joe White) (110.0 SRM) 4.0 %

0.12 kg Carafa I (337.0 SRM) 2.0 %

0.12 kg Roasted Barley (Joe White) (710.0 SRM) 2.0 %

All you need to do is ring/fax your brewshop with the above and ask them to crush it for you. You can then pick it up later in the day. It will be all mixed up and in a large brown paper bag. Keep it in the fridge until you use it and try and use it within a week at most now that it is crushed. [Editors Note: You can now get grain from Ross that is vacuum-sealed so no worries about when you use it.]

2. Work Out the Temperature of Your Mash: You should be able to get this from your recipe as well especially if it is a recipe in Beersmith or Promash format. In fact, it would be well worth your while doing your first AGs with one of these programs just to make these calculations easy. Mash temperatures range from around 65 to 69 degrees. The lower end of the scale produces drier, thinner beers such as youd find in a typical lager or pilsener. The higher end produces fuller, sweeter beers. Our recipe asked us to mash at 66 degrees.

3. Heat Enough Water for Your Mash: Im going to assume youre using one of the brewing programs above. It will tell you how much water to heat for your mash. Our recipe says to heat 15.04 litres which is about 2.5 litres of water for each kg of grain. (We ended up accidentally throwing 17 litres in no big deal though. One beer and already we couldnt count!) The heating of your mash and sparge water is done in what is called the HLT or, 'Hot Liquor Tank.' This can be any type of vessel that you can heat water in e.g. stock pot, urn, legally bought keg etc. I just used a large pot on a 3 ring burner.



4. Heat Your Mash Water to 9 Degrees Higher than What You Want Your Mash to Be: If you simply heated your water to 66 degrees and then added your grain the mix would be cooler than 66 degrees as the grain is at room temperature. (If you kept your grain in the fridge, take it out the day before you brew so it reaches room temperature.) Up here, room temp is about 25 degrees and so Ross knows if he adds 9 degrees to his mash temperature then the final mix will equal 66 degrees. 66+9 = 75 so we heated our 15 litres of water to 75 degrees.

The beer programs will work out the above for you pretty accurately. If you forgot to take your grain out of the fridge or if you live in a colder climate, the program will compensate for this and you would find yourself having to heat your mash water to a higher temperature than 75.

5. Pre-Heat Your Mash Tun: We didnt bother with this but you might like to boil a kettle and warm your mash tun up a little. Probably doesnt make much difference in an esky. Its also a good idea to keep a full kettle boiled in case you dont quite reach your strike temperature which in our case was 66 degrees. Your esky acts as an MLT or 'Mash Lauter Tun' as this is the vessel in which you mash and lauter (rinse) the grain. At it's base there will be sometime of manifold to filter out grain particles as you drain the tun during sparging. Here's mine at the base of the esky.



6. Pour the Hot Water Into the Tun and Add Grain: Your 15 litres of water at 75 degrees goes in first. Then pour your grain in from a height smoothly and fairly quickly around the top of the water. Give it a good mix up making sure any balls of grain are broken up. Take a temperature reading and if its out by more than a degree or so, then add some hot or cold water to hit your 66 degrees. Let it sit for 90 minutes. If you want to check the temp and give it a stir half way through then go for it. We didnt and the final temp didnt drop at all.



7. Bring Your Sparge Water to the Boil: Its not a bad idea to do this once you have the mash under way. Once boiled, you can turn it off and give it another burst of heat just before the mash ends. Another great thing about batch sparging is there is no mucking around with getting sparge water temperatures right. All you have to do is boil the water once.

Again, your recipe will tell you how much water to boil for sparging. In our case, it said sparge with 21.42 litres of 90 degree water. (Forget the 90 bit.) So, we boiled up about 22 litres and well just use 22 for the sake of this exercise.

8. Work Out Amount of Sparge Water for the First Run: What happens now is the sparge water is added to the tun in 2 equal hits but we need to allow for the water already in the mash tun and the water that will be soaked up and held in the grain. Heres the only maths youll need and its pretty simple.

Firsly, look at your recipe to find out what the required boil volume is. (This is the volume of water that will go into the kettle at the beginning of the boil.) In our case it was 30.44lts. Beersmith works this figure out by allowing for dead space in your tun and kettle, water soaked up and not released by the grain and also evaporation during the boil. As you can see, having Beersmith or Promash makes things easy. Heres the only calculation you need to do.

A. We have a required boil volume of 30.44 litres. Lets call it 30

B. Beersmith tells us that our sparge volume of water is 22

C. We want 2 equal runs of volume so 30 divided by 2 equals 15

D. First run volume equals B-C which equals 7

Therefore on our first run we add 7 litres of boiling water to the grain and water already in the tun.

You might be wondering why you just dont add 2 lots of 15 litres. If we did this, what we drained off from the first run would be a far larger volume from that drained off on the second run as all the mash water (15.04 litres less that held by the grain) would be drained off along with 15 litres of sparge water.

9. Add the Boiling Water to the Tun for the First Run: Now just tip the 7 litres into the tun and give it a very good stir up and then let it sit for 5 or 10 minutes. Youll notice that the temperature of the mash is now higher than 66. Ours only rose to 72 after we added the sparge water for the first run. This is because we added less water to make up for the extra few litres we incorrectly added at the start of the mash. A slightly higher temperature would have been better but, once again, no big deal.

(What should you be doing with the other 15 litres of boiled water while all this is going on? The answer is nothing. Just leave it off the heat and it will lose temperature, which is what you want as the first run water will have raised the grain bed temp.

The following shows me syphoning 7 litres into a jug which I then added to the esky then stirred.



10. Drain the Tun for the First Time: The stirring we did above is what rinses the sugar out of the grain in batch sparging. The sitting for 5 to 10 minutes really just allows things to settle a little. Up until now, no liquid has been drained from the tun. Nows the time for this!

(The other great thing about batch sparging, is that it is not critical where your manifold lies in the esky. Youve probably read a lot about this. Same with grain bed depth. These mainly apply to fly sparging. In batch sparging, its the minute or so of thorough stirring that does the work of rinsing. The only thing the manifold and grain bed depth does is filter the beer. All we did was make sure my braid was lying on the bottom after we did the stir up.

To drain the tun, first of all grab a jug, open the tun tap and allow a steady trickle of wort into the jug. Youll see it become clear (less cloudy) after a litre or so as the grain bed settles and starts to act as a filter. Turn the tap off and pour the cloudy liquor back into the esky. We poured it slowly over a cheese grater so as not to stir up the bed. This works well.



Now, open the tap and allow the wort to drain in your kettle. This might take 15 minutes or so. 1 litre draining per minute is about what to aim for although with batch sparging you can go as fast as you like as long as the wort does not become cloudy.



Once drained, you can whack the kettle on the heat to start bringing it to the boil while you work on the second run.

11. The Second Run: The second run is just like the first except this time youll be adding the remainder of the sparge water (15lts) to the now drained grain. As I said above, the temperature of the second run sparge water does not have to be boiling as the grain bed is already raised to a level where enzyme activity stops.

Now repeat what you did for the first run. i.e. stir the mash up really well again, let sit for 5 to 10 minutes, drain off some liquor until it becomes clear, return that to the tun and then drain the esky into the kettle.

Mashing and sparging complete! Boil away, adding your hops when appropriate, and after 90 minutes you should be able to drain off about 23 litres. In my case, I told Beersmith that thered be 1 litre of wort Id be unable to syphon from the kettle. The program worked out thered be about 6 litres evaporated in the boil. 23+1+6 = the Initial Boil Volume of 30 litres that Beersmith worked out in (8) above.

To see some pictures of the boil and to also get a laugh, check out Ross's post here

Cheers
Pat

 

[Fingerlickin_B]

Well there you go, the simplest way I've seen it put yet.

What comes next, a bag in an insulated mash tun and no sparge? Sounds rather stupid doesn't it? Well not to me! h34r: B)

Thanks Pat

PZ.

 

[Fingerlickin_B]

Hey Pat, Im not trying to be pedantic, but there are two conflicting statements here:

D. First run volume equals B-C which equals 7
Therefore on our first run we add 7 litres of boiling water to the grain and water already in the tun.

9. Add the Boiling Water to the Tun for the First Run: Now just tip the 15 litres into the tun

Maybe it should be revised? :beer:

PZ.

 

[Steve]

Very good post Pat.

Regarding number 7. I dont boil my sparge water I heat it to 78 degrees. 78 seemed to be the consensus after reading a few other posts.

Cheers
Steve

 

[Stuster]

Good post, PP. Just some little quibbles, but the method you have is fine.

6. Let it sit for 90 minutes.

There's some variation in how long the mash is. I'd say 60-90 minutes is most common.

9. Add the Boiling Water to the Tun for the First Run: Now just tip the 15 litres into the tun and give it a very good stir up and then let it sit for about 15 minutes.

I don't really think there's any need to let the mash sit for 15 minutes at mash out. Do if you want to, but I've done it both ways and it didn't seem to make any difference. (It shouldn't really as all you are doing is washing out the sugars. Conversion has already happened.)

Regarding number 7. I dont boil my sparge water I heat it to 78 degrees. 78 seemed to be the consensus after reading a few other posts.

The 78 degrees thing is really for fly spargers to avoid tannin extraction. I don't think there's any problems with using hotter water than this when batch sparging. There's little chance of getting the temperature too high, and even then the ph should be low enough to avoid tannin extraction. Using hotter water should give you better efficiency and less chance of a stuck sparge. :super:

 

[Steve]

Cheers Stu.....thats cleared up that one.
Steve

 

[DJR]

Another thing, Point 11, the wait time can be reduced from 15 minutes to 5-10 minutes with some good stirring at the start. Denny says there's little difference in efficiency and the tests i've done seem to confirm that. I let it sit for 5 minutes after stirring well, recirc'ed and ran off, and i still got 82% for that batch.

And as Stuster said, go as hot as you like, personally i try not to exceed 80C and shoot for 78C though, something tells me that i just shouldn't go too high.

You can also do a multi-step rest quite easily in the same way you mash out - this is useful for something when you want mega-attenuation like a Kolsch or dry lager - you can start at 60C (beta amylase) with a 2.2L/kg mash ratio for 40-60 mins, then add about 30% of the amount of mash water in boiling water, stir it it to hit about 70C for alpha amylase, which will increase the mash ratio to 3L/kg, then after another 15-30 mins add in another round of boiling water to hit mashout. Programs like Brewsta make the calcs easy.

 

[Jye]

Good stuff Pat This is exactly how I and most likely a number of other brewers started. New brewers shouldnt have any problems if they follow this for the first couple of mashes, or until they become comfortable with their gear, then they can start to make minor changes as mentioned above.

 

[Ross]

Very good post Pat.

Regarding number 7. I dont boil my sparge water I heat it to 78 degrees. 78 seemed to be the consensus after reading a few other posts.

Cheers
Steve

Hi Steve, as Stuster correctly pointed out, this is an issue for fly not batch spargers. I add my mash out water at just on boiling which brings the mash out to approx 80c. If you add 78c water to a cool mash, you'll still have your grain sat in the mashing zone & nowhere near hot enough for a good mashout.

cheers Ross

 

[Steve]

Very good post Pat.

Regarding number 7. I dont boil my sparge water I heat it to 78 degrees. 78 seemed to be the consensus after reading a few other posts.

Cheers
Steve

Hi Steve, as Stuster correctly pointed out, this is an issue for fly not batch spargers. I add my mash out water at just on boiling which brings the mash out to approx 80c. If you add 78c water to a cool mash, you'll still have your grain sat in the mashing zone & nowhere near hot enough for a good mashout.

cheers Ross

Righto - thanks for that Ross.....what are the side effects of a cool 78 degree mashout? Still learning.
Cheers
Steve

 

[Ross]

Righto - thanks for that Ross.....what are the side effects of a cool 78 degree mashout? Still learning.
Cheers
Steve

Steve, apart from the sugars being less viscous at the lower temp & therefore harder to wash out the grains, if you were mashing at say 63c for a dry beer & added at 78c, you might only lift the grain temp to say 70c - at this temp conversion is still happening & you start producing unfermentable sugars which will add body & sweetness to your beer. You want the mash out temp (after adding water) to be in the high 70's.

cheers Ross...

 

[AndrewQLD]

Righto - thanks for that Ross.....what are the side effects of a cool 78 degree mashout? Still learning.
Cheers
Steve

Steve, apart from the sugars being less viscous at the lower temp & therefore harder to wash out the grains, if you were mashing at say 63c for a dry beer & added at 78c, you might only lift the grain temp to say 70c - at this temp conversion is still happening & you start producing unfermentable sugars which will add body & sweetness to your beer. You want the mash out temp (after adding water) to be in the high 70's.

cheers Ross...

I mash out with 85c water for my batch sparge and that brings my temp up to around 76c, I only do this to stop the enzymes from converting.

When batch sparging the viscosity of the wort is of little importance because you are not washing or rinsing out the grains, when batch sparging you're diluting the wort and then completely draining your mash tun of a liquid at a set gravity reading. In other words you don't start with a high gravity and sparge until a low gravity is reached you add the sparge water in total diluting the mash and then drain, so viscosity has little effect on extraction.

Cheers Andrew

 

[Stuster]

Probably you are right that there is not much difference in extraction. But viscosity does have an effect on the chances of having a stuck sparge though. In my experience (and on my system) these few degrees make all the difference. YMMV.

 

[PistolPatch]

Many thanks for the feedback. I'll add some pics and do a further tidy uo tomorrow. Special thanks to AndrewQLD because if it wasn't for all that pilsner made from his recipe that I drank last night, I never would have posted - lol and yum!

I think most questions have been answered so far thanks to others. Well spotted Finger on the 15 litres. That was incorrect and I've fixed it now.

There's no reason why you couldn't do your bag in the esky either. You could full volume or batch sparge. I was trying to think of the benefits of this today and I suppose one advantage of this besides insulation, would be not having to lift the bag out of the kettle as you have to do in BIAB. This would make double-batching quite easy.

Thanks again,
Pat

 

[AndrewQLD]

That's very true Stuster, the higher temp does help make the sparge easier and stuck sparges are less of a problem. Once you know your system it is fairly easy to work out the best temp for your batch sparge addition and what temp it should be to achieve mash out.
However there is a lot of evidence that too high a sparge temp can lead to problems including tannin extraction and starch haze in the finished beer.

"Starch haze is generally no problem with long mashes. It is more often associated with improper lautering technique, especially high temperatures of the sparge water or the mash itself"
sparging

and
"starch haze
Cloudiness in beer due to suspended starch particles. Usually caused by, incorrect mash temperature resulting in incomplete saccharification, or sparging temperatures over 180 F (82 C), which can dissolve residual starch from the mash."
starch

All I am saying is keeping your final mash out temp to above 76c and below 82c will give you the best of both worlds, better flow rate with less chance of stuck sparges and also less chance of tannin and haze problems.

Cheers
Andrew

Edit: Pat sorry for dragging this off topic, let me know if you want me to delete it.

 

[bugwan]

Great work PP. Your posts on this forum are fantastic for newer brewers. Not to mention reintroducing the basics to seasoned brewers.

Keep up the great work!
Bugs

 

[Ross]

Edit: Pat sorry for dragging this off topic, let me know if you want me to delete it.

Not off topic at all Andrew this is a guide to mashing & sparging.

I totally agree with your post, it's pretty well exactly what I thought I was saying - yes you are not rinsing the grains, but you are diluting the sugars & hot water does this much better than cold - Though i must admit the advice on starches being redissolved above 82c is new to me (thanks for that), but adding even boiling water to the mash for the 1st run off, in my experience only lifts it to just 80c, so all sweet...

cheers Ross

 

[tangent]

Good post PP.

Once drained, you can whack the kettle on the heat to start bringing it to the boil while you work on the second run.

One more little thing, a brewer on BBR suggested collecting all of your wort before commencing the boil rather than having the first runnings heating and then adding more stuff. I can imagine pros and cons to it, but I thought I'd mention it.

 

[PistolPatch]

I've just tidied up the first post a bit and added some of Ross's pics. Have also added or changed a few things after reading your posts above. Hopefully the pics make things a little easier for new brewers.

Am really enjoying the discussion and comments such as Tangents above as well. No way is any of this stuff off-topic Andrew. Your comments are always totally educational.

One thing that I still wonder about is the 2 equal run-offs. If memory serves me correctly, I only ever hit about 72 degrees on the first sparge. Wouldn't it be better to have a higher volume first run to get the temp over 74?

And Bugs many thanks for your post mate.

Spot ya,
Pat

 

[AndrewQLD]

One thing that I still wonder about is the 2 equal run-offs. If memory serves me correctly, I only ever hit about 72 degrees on the first sparge. Wouldn't it be better to have a higher volume first run to get the temp over 74?

And Bugs many thanks for your post mate.

Spot ya,
Pat

Pat, that depends on how you batch sparge, I drain my mash tun of wort and then add all my sparge in one hit, a single batch sparge. Others add a small amount of water and then runoff to give them 2 batch sparges.
That is why a sparge temp of 85c gets my mash up to 76c because all my water is going in in one hit, I probably should have mentioned that in my original post, sorry guys .

Cheers
Andrew