yeah - how long did the sparge take?? sounds good if you had trouble keeping the water up.
didn't time it but not long at all. about the time it took to fill my 1 litre jug from the HLT and pour it into the grain father 16 times. About halfway through I realised it would be much quicker to just dunk the jug in the top of the HLT rather than run it out of the HLT tap! I got my grain milled by craftbrewer, it seemed like a pretty average crush, bit of flower but not too fine.
my uninformed question on the clear wort bit is this... my wort overflow is often crystal clear after 1/2 hour. if sparging makes it cloudier (and it does), then (and this is the bit i don't understand), wouldn't the simultaneous sparging still pump cloudy wort into the mix?? where would the separation lie?? i get what you're doing, but i don't understand the science.
what I am suggesting is that I don't lift the grain basket up to sparge. Lifting up the basket seems to disturb the grain bed and sucks through a heap of particles. If I just leave the grain bed where it is and redirect the pump outlet into a third vessel I should be able to maintain the filtration properties of the grain bed. So I will replace the recirculating wort with sparge water and it should flow through the grain bed and come out of the pump outlet all nice and filtered. It might get a bit dirty for the last few litres but I am thinking it would be an improvement in wort clarify going into the kettle.
to date, i haven't overly worried about whirlpooling the hotbreak. and there is usually a load of debris in the last litre on transfer. i tip the gf through a fine strainer into the fermenter at that point. no liquid lost and not much that didn't go through the chller. by the time it finishes fermenting, i find the rest has pretty much settled into trub.
are your beers turning out nice and clear? I have a bit of a personal goal to try to get nice clean clear wort going into the fermenter, I feel like it will produce better pils, ESBs etc. My first beer was a wheat hopped with galaxy so I don't really care too much about clarity obviously but the next one I do is going to be a pils with california lager yeast so there will be nowhere for haze and off flavours to hide. Trying to take my brewing to the next level this time around!!
one point, though - i always leave just enough wort to cover the base of the gf - then hit anything stuck to the floor of the gf with a stainless steel egg lifter. gets it immediately clean without fear of cemented roast grain dust glued to the gf. for some reason, this works, but if you completely empty the gf and then try to clean the floor, it's out with the bi-carb soda and vinegar, and that ain't fun.
I noted the instructions say to give the bottom of the vessel a scrape with a mash paddle a few times during the boil, but I don't have such a paddle yet. I find a stainless serving spoon from the kitchen makes a pretty good mash paddle but not for scraping the bottom of the vessel. no issues on clean up though and the boil rolled nicely.
if you do go down the whirlpooling transfer and tube thing, pls report - we all on a learning curve with this beast.
I'm going to try the alternative sparge method next brew for sure. I even have a spare urn coming soon so I can heat the runnings while I sparge. I'll be sure to report all results. I'm tempted to brew tonight but I can see myself going to bed at 1am. maybe if I can get home from work by 5pm and mash in by 5:30... mmmm...
