No Sparging brewing

[kimboski]

Hi Guys
Just a few questions regarding No Sparge brewing.
Question - Is the brew efficiency low when you go to " no sparge brewing " i got a smaller than expected brew the last time i brewed , but was much easier & a big improvement on flavour.
I think i was sparging for to long and extracting undesirable flavours from grains.
Anyway no sparge brewing is easy and i get better results.
Question - is citric acid O/K to lower water PH, the mains PH was 7.2 the PH after mash was 6.4 should i adjust water PH or is this O/K.

 

[kimboski]

Sorry about the heading it should have been No Sparge Brewing

 

[dent]

The pH of the water is irrelevant. The buffering capacity of the water is what matters, unfortunately a pH meter cannot test this. Instead you want to be testing the pH of the mash. This way you find the outcome of the water buffering capacity vs that of the grist.

I've heard mixed reports about using citric - typically lactic or phosphoric are used.

 

[kimboski]

thanks dent for your prompt reply. Ill change to lactic or phosphoric. The PH of the mash was 6.4

 

[dent]

Yeah with a mash pH that high your efficiency will be crap, sparge or not.

Apart from that you're not guaranteed to get lower efficiency with no sparge, but it is highly likely. The liquid soaked into the spent grain when you're finished filling the kettle will have more sugars left in it, compared to a typical sparge situation.

That being said the loss of a few points of gravity is easily offset by not having to worry about heating an HLT, sparge water acidification, etc. You can always add more ingredients to match when you've dialed it in.

Also I find you get better malt character per gravity point if you're sparging less.

 

[kimboski]

Sorry the mash PH was 5.4 & ill add more grain due to loss of efficiency

 

[MHB]

I would avoid Citric, Lactic being my weapon of choice - about 90% of the acidity in pale malt comes from naturally occurring lactic acid, so you are just adding more of something that occurs naturally.
If you do everything right (milling, mashing in, mash temperatures, mash pH, mineral content, sparging...) you will or can get close to theoretical yields.
Full volume mashing will leave some (the same as the wort extract content) in the malt, but as you are (or should be) using much higher L:G ratios it will be less than most 3V systems would. If you were sparging really slowly (90-120minutes) with well acidified <80oC water (like a commercial brewery) you can get most of the residual extract (up to 97%), most home brewers go way too fast to get anything like that sort of yield.

All this works for BIAB, well it actually works for all mash/first running calculations.
If you have a play with the following formula you can predict the OG of your wort fairly accurately, or rearrange it to work out how much water to add to get a target OG.
OG in Plato = Yield Potential as percent (Y%) / L:G+Y%
If you has an single malt mash (just to make it easy) that had a Coarse Grind As Is potential of 76% (Y%) (you might need to look at a COA) and you mashed in at 6:1 your OG would be 0.76/6+0.76 = 0.1124 or 11.24oP (SG 1.049)
Where it gets interesting is when you start to look at the total amount of extract as a percentage (excel gets really useful about now)
Making some pretty standard assumptions, like 1kg of grist will absorb 0.8kg of water. so from the 6L mashed in we would expect 5.2L of first runnings with an OG of 1.049 so 4.957Kg of wort and as oP is %WW, you would have 4.957*0.1124=0.557kg of extract.
the 1kg of malt had a potential of 0.76kg so you have extracted 73% of the potential.
That's the absolute upper limit on what you can expect, as your L:G falls so will your efficiency.

You can rearrange the formula to work out how much water you need (L:G)
Weight of mash water = (Y%/Target oP first runnings) - Y%
So if you wanted an OG of 1.060 or 15oP (before boil), using the same assumptions as above
Water Weight = (0.76/0.15)-0.76 = 4.3 That will be per kg of malt so its your L:G
Your efficiency wont be too good.
Mark

 

[kimboski]

Thanks Mark
Much appreciated

 

[Lyrebird_Cycles]

As an addendum to Mark's comments: the lost extract in the mash bed can be estimated by taking the product of malt bill mass and gravity of the final runnings (in oP) and multiplying by a factor to reflect the efficiency of diffusion out of the grist particles.

In the case of "no sparge" this factor should be around 100% as diffusion out of grist particles is poor due to the low concentration gradient. Also with "no sparge" your final runnings are quite high gravity so the lost extract is large. As an example, if you use 4 kg of malt and get a final gravity of say 12.5 oP you'll be leaving about 0.5 kg of extract behind (4 kg x 0.125), so your maximal possible extraction will decline from ~3.2kg to around ~2.7kg.

With sparge it depends on the length of the lauter cycle but will usually be much lower, an optimised system would leave around 40g of extract behind so the maximal possible extraction will be about 3.16 kg

The efficiency deficit from "no sparge" in this case would be around 15%.

That being said, remember I predicated this on optimal efficiency and very few HB systems get anywhere near optimal efficiency so you are probably not giving up as much as this calculation would indicate.

BTW a congress mash leaves somewhere around 2% of extract behind in the bed, so this should be taken into account ( eg the potential extract figure in a malt report is around 2% lower than the actual )

 

[kimboski]

wow i have a lot to learn

 

[Lyrebird_Cycles]

Ok I'm sorry, I just looked at your post count and realised that both Marks (myself and MHB) have way overpitched their responses.

The efficiency lost to "no sparge" is mostly* due to the fact that the grain bed remains wet with a quantity of wort that is roughly equal to the mass of the grain.

In "no sparge" you aren't rinsing the bed** so what it's wet with is at the full gravity of your runnings: say 12.5 oP (call it 1.050 SG) in the example above.

When sparging you are rinsing the bed so the runnings are diluted: the aim is to get the runnings down to about 2 oP (call it 1.008 SG).

Therefore the quantity of extract left behind is generally much larger when using "no sparge".



*There is also the issue of the effectiveness of grain bed leaching but that's beyond the scope of this reply.

** Sparge is just a fancy word for sprinkle, it describes sprinkling water onto the bed to rinse out the trapped wort.

 

[kimboski]

When I was sparging I think I allowed my runnings drop well below 1.008 and at the same time the PH increased over 6. The last brew I did when sparging was pretty rank.

 

[wide eyed and legless]

As you said you will notice a better tasting beer doing the no sparge method owing to a more stable pH, rule of thumb I add 20% more grain to make up the drop of yield in sugars from the mash. It is better tasting and saves a lot of mucking around with sparge water, the extra grain is a small price to pay.
Dave Miller covers it in his book Home Brewers Guide.

 

[kimboski]

Thanks for the heads up about Dave Millers book regarding no sparging. The book is available online ill read it tonight.

 

[Hpal]

I use the BIAB method, nothing fancy, and consistently see 85% efficiency, nothing wrong with that if you ask me.

 

[MHB]

As you said you will notice a better tasting beer doing the no sparge method owing to a more stable pH, rule of thumb I add 20% more grain to make up the drop of yield in sugars from the mash. It is better tasting and saves a lot of mucking around with sparge water, the extra grain is a small price to pay.
Dave Miller covers it in his book Home Brewers Guide.

More to the point, when you no-sparge the extract content of the wort remains high, sugars block tannins from into solution (insert Billy Tea story here (again)). Most tannins (well polyphenols) are extracted late in the sparge as the sugar content falls and the pH rises (why we acidify sparge water)
I do sort of agree, no sparge is a simple and effective way to get started brewing, you will make good beer and at a fairly small price in extra grain (lower efficiency). The brewing maths is fairly straight forward and it requires a minimum of gear, space, controllers... just get a decent thermometer.
Hook in and have fun.
Mark

 

[Meddo]

Most of my short brewing career has been doing full-volume single vessel brewing (malt pipe) with no sparge. Recently for a few reasons (increase efficiency, vessel volume, height of recirc liquor above grain bed) I've started keeping about 2/3 of the total water aside and sprinkling that at room temp over the hoisted malt pipe with a watering can to rinse the sugars from the grains. It takes about a minute or two for the bulk of each 10 L of rinse water to run through the bed after I've finished pouring it over the top (three or four minutes actually pouring). Is there any real downside to doing this? I'm measuring and adjusting pH in the mash with lactic, and adding some lactic to the rinse water as well as per Brewer's Friend water calcs recommendations.

Rough figures for context -

• 8 kg grain
• 45 L mash water + salts + lactic adjustment to measured pH
• 20 L rinse water + ~0.3 mL lactic 88%

From what I've read this seems fine although it's not a topic that I've gone into too much depth on yet.

Thanks for advice

 

[Meddo]

Most of my short brewing career has been doing full-volume single vessel brewing (malt pipe) with no sparge. Recently for a few reasons (increase efficiency, vessel volume, height of recirc liquor above grain bed) I've started keeping about 2/3 of the total water aside and sprinkling that at room temp over the hoisted malt pipe with a watering can to rinse the sugars from the grains. It takes about a minute or two for the bulk of each 10 L of rinse water to run through the bed after I've finished pouring it over the top (three or four minutes actually pouring). Is there any real downside to doing this? I'm measuring and adjusting pH in the mash with lactic, and adding some lactic to the rinse water as well as per Brewer's Friend water calcs recommendations.

Rough figures for context -

• 8 kg grain
• 45 L mash water + salts + lactic adjustment to measured pH
• 20 L rinse water + ~0.3 mL lactic 88%

From what I've read this seems fine although it's not a topic that I've gone into too much depth on yet.

Thanks for advice

Actually one downside I've noticed is that the rinsing liberates a lot of the fines - that the grain bed had previously filtered - back into the wort.

 

[wide eyed and legless]

As you are using Brewers Friend, here is further information on the length of time etc for sparging, I used to sparge but gave it away in favour of the 'no sparge'. If you have the volume in a single vessel micro brewery I really can't see the reason to sparge.
https://www.brewersfriend.com/2009/07/04/sparging-methods/

 

[Hpal]

I sometimes, if I’m trying to squeeze extra volume out, withhold say 2 or 3 litres from the mash and add it when mash is over by rinsing it through the grain bag. Just enough to rinse any extra sugars, sometime I heat it up in the kettle to 78c then rinse it through. For example I did I a 33L brew in my 50L keggle, full mash vol was maybe 50 L so I withheld 3L so it wasn’t too full then added it at the end. Worked well.