SJW
As you must brew, so you must drink
- Joined
- 10/3/04
- Messages
- 3,401
- Reaction score
- 211
My first 3 brews on the BM I have slowly crept up to 85% efficiency, but yesterday I made a near fatal mistake. It was a bit of a test to see how efficient or how useful sparging is with the BM. Mainly because I listened to a Basic Brewing podcast on full volume mash's.
Anyway I mashed in with 26 litres and after the mash I lifted the malt pipe and basically dumped 9 litres of 78 deg sparge water in the top of the malt pipe. Usually I would do this part very slow. Anyway on checking my preboil gravity it was way down. So much so that the last of the runnings were 1.045 and the gravity of the wort was only 1.035.
So it should go without saying "sparge slow" even with the BM.
To save my brew I just recirculated a few litres of wort through the mash and added a bit of dex.
Steve
Anyway I mashed in with 26 litres and after the mash I lifted the malt pipe and basically dumped 9 litres of 78 deg sparge water in the top of the malt pipe. Usually I would do this part very slow. Anyway on checking my preboil gravity it was way down. So much so that the last of the runnings were 1.045 and the gravity of the wort was only 1.035.
So it should go without saying "sparge slow" even with the BM.
To save my brew I just recirculated a few litres of wort through the mash and added a bit of dex.
Steve