Questions To All The Fly Guys Outt There

[Banshee]

I fly sparge and just want to clear a few things up.
Question:

1. I always leave the grain floating and leave at least an inch of hot liquor above the bed, even till the end of sparge. Is this correct? Do you run the bed dry at the end or leave floating always?

2. How much water do you sparge with? Do you sparge to final batch volume and then top up kettle with water for evaporation or do you run till final kettle volume is reached?

3. Alternatively do you finish sparge according to run off SG? Dark beer finish at low SG. Pale beer slightly higher SG.

Thanks FLY guys.

 

[Acasta]

i see what you did there. pretty fly for a white guy would have been better.

 

[asis]

I'm no expert but this is what we do

1. Run Dry, don't know if this is right or wrong.

2. Run til kettle preboil volume is reached, our evap and losses are very consistent now.

3. Generally monitor SG towards the end for curiositys sake but don't normally get to low.

Efficiency is for 1050ish beers is 80%+ (84% this afternoon).

Cheers

Adam

 

[Screwtop]

I fly sparge and just want to clear a few things up.
Question:

1. I always leave the grain floating and leave at least an inch of hot liquor above the bed, even till the end of sparge. Is this correct? Do you run the bed dry at the end or leave floating always?

The same but I run dry.

2. How much water do you sparge with? Do you sparge to final batch volume and then top up kettle with water for evaporation or do you run till final kettle volume is reached?

Know my system well enough to end up with correct volume and gravity.

3. Alternatively do you finish sparge according to run off SG? Dark beer finish at low SG. Pale beer slightly higher SG.

Thanks FLY guys.

No longer, use salts for mash PH adjustment

Screwy

 

[Duff]

I fly sparge and just want to clear a few things up.
Question:

1. I always leave the grain floating and leave at least an inch of hot liquor above the bed, even till the end of sparge. Is this correct? Do you run the bed dry at the end or leave floating always?

2. How much water do you sparge with? Do you sparge to final batch volume and then top up kettle with water for evaporation or do you run till final kettle volume is reached?

3. Alternatively do you finish sparge according to run off SG? Dark beer finish at low SG. Pale beer slightly higher SG.

Thanks FLY guys.

1. The grain bed compacts during sparge so at times I may have 4 inches + of sparge water sitting above it, which I then run dry.

2. Total water is the required pre-boil volume in the kettle including the original mash volume.

3. I used to check gravity using a refractometer going into the kettle, but now am comfortable with my system that I sparge until I get what I need. I will check however big beers once I have reached pre-boil to see if some of the extra run off could be used for starters, etc.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

I take off the first runnings till the grain bed is about 5mm below the surface, then flood till a few cms of water is above the grain, run off till 5mm again... Repeat. The bed isn't exactly floating free... But it's not particularly being sucked down on to the lauter plate either.

I keep adding sparge water till I am about 7L of wort short of full pre-boil volume, then cut off and drain below the surface of the grain bed. This doesn't completely drain the tun, there is usually around 5-10L of liquid still left to drain when I get to my full pre-boil volume in the kettle.

Obviously I sparge to kettle volume... But I have done a fair bit of work to make sure that my last runnings pH never falls below 6. Before I had that under control I would have been cutting off the run-off at a gravity of 1.010 and topping up the kettle if needed. I'd rather add a bit of DME to the kettle than oversparge to get volume/gravity..... Not a fan of running the bed dry and taking all the liquid, but it's not like I think it's a travesty or anything, just not my preference.

TB

 

[asis]

I take off the first runnings till the grain bed is about 5mm below the surface, then flood till a few cms of water is above the grain, run off till 5mm again... Repeat. The bed isn't exactly floating free... But it's not particularly being sucked down on to the lauter plate either.

I keep adding sparge water till I am about 7L of wort short of full pre-boil volume, then cut off and drain below the surface of the grain bed. This doesn't completely drain the tun, there is usually around 5-10L of liquid still left to drain when I get to my full pre-boil volume in the kettle.

Obviously I sparge to kettle volume... But I have done a fair bit of work to make sure that my last runnings pH never falls below 6. Before I had that under control I would have been cutting off the run-off at a gravity of 1.010 and topping up the kettle if needed. I'd rather add a bit of DME to the kettle than oversparge to get volume/gravity..... Not a fan of running the bed dry and taking all the liquid, but it's not like I think it's a travesty or anything, just not my preference.

TB

Thirsty are there any ill effects from daining the tun dry if pH etc is all ok?

I do 44 litre batches with a 30 urn as the HLT which means i generally sparge with 25 and drain the tun dry.

 

[Banshee]

Thank guys.
I have noticed that you drain your beds at the end which is what I will start doing as well. When I punched in some figures into 'water needed' in beer smith I wondered why the sparge water needed was low and this explains it.
As for ph and SG I will monitor it initially and hopefully all will be sweet and not go beyond the rcommended levels.

This is going to save me buying a bigger HLT.

Also what is your run off in litres per minute?

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Thirsty are there any ill effects from daining the tun dry if pH etc is all ok?

I do 44 litre batches with a 30 urn as the HLT which means i generally sparge with 25 and drain the tun dry.

Probably bugger all assuming that your last runnings are still pH 6 or less. But I sit in a room all day at work and get to watch a lot of run-offs where you can see a live graph of the run-off gravity vs time. It goes down, down, down as the sugars slowly get rinsed out.... Then all of a sudden it turns back up again. It's at that turning point where the sugars are all (mostly) gone, pH rises and then "other stuff" starts being extracted from the grain.. Bad stuff, you know what it is. That's where the run off is cut.. As close as possible to that turning point where you have all the sugars and as few as possible of the tannins etc that are hot on their heels. Of course on the work system everything is worked out so that the "Gravity Break" as it is referred to, happens just at the time when the kettle is full, the total gravity is right. And the lauter tuns is nearly drained.. But if things go astray.... They don't let much of that bad run off through before they call it quits no matter what.

I figure if you drain your tun dry... You have to be sucking it past that point. If your efficiency is only in the 70-80% range, then I suppose you might simply never get to the point where it happens anywhere in the grain bed...but my tun gets me about 90% efficiency into the kettle.. So I think I need to play it a little safe just to be sure.

Banshee - I am running-off moderately fast and taking about 45min to collect 30L of wort. But I have a very well designed and built mash tun (Beer Belly, customised) and it allows me to get away with a little unseemly haste.

TB

 

[MHB]

Only slightly OT...

Something I read about years ago and haven't gotten around to trying tho I must.

Inline conductivity meters are about the cheapest instrument known, apparently as soon as tannins start to leach there is a very sharp rise in the conductivity of the wort. So sharp that the author said they could put the sensor near the mashtun and a diverter valve before the kettle could intercept the unwanted portion of the wort.

Certainly sounds like a fun project for someone with a bit more skill at data logging than me, shouldn't be too hard to work out a set value after a couple of trials.

MHB

 

[Banshee]

...but my tun gets me about 90% efficiency into the kettle.. So I think I need to play it a little safe just to be sure.

Banshee - I am running-off moderately fast and taking about 45min to collect 30L of wort. But I have a very well designed and built mash tun (Beer Belly, customised) and it allows me to get away with a little unseemly haste.

TB

I use a rubbermaid cooler with a stainless false bottom very much like the beer beely configuration and run through a herms which I just construted, not put into practice yet. I have done some water only test runs and have found that I get 1 degree rise in one and a half minutes and the cooler holds the temperature very well. Other night I got the water up to 76 C and put the lid on without screwing it down and when I woke (14 hours latter) the temperature was at 46 C.
What I am hoping is if you get an efficiency of 90% I may be able to aswell.
My last brew was 85% with mash on flame in kettle then transfere to lauter tun. I do hope I can get that extr 5%.
Fingers crossed.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

oh you'll have no issue getting 90% - lauter efficiency is related primarily to the amount you sparge and how quickly you sparge (assuming your mash tun isn't a train wreck that is) - so if you are willing to go slowly enough and sparge enough.. you can get almost whatever efficiency you want. Its just a matter of whether that ties in with the rest of your brewing process and whether its going to start impacting your quality.

I don't particularly "try" to get 90% - but with my set-up and process (3.5:1 liquor to grist ratio, step mash, 25L post boil volume, 30L pre-boil, 90min boil) which I keep the same for every single sized batch... 88-90% is just what I get. I would get less if I boiled for 60min and sparged less... I'd get more if I used a lower L:G and sparged more. But at 90% I think I am on the limit of how far I can push the lauter before I start to have to be very careful abut quality issues - so if for some reason I wanted to do a 2hr boil I would probably be taking steps to cut the sparge proportion down a little to avoid oversparging.

If you're on 85% already, I suspect you'll end up higher with the HERMS. re-circulating systems tend to get a little better efficiency than non recirculating ones.

High efficiency is nice - not so much because you need it or its admirable in and of itself, but because it lets you know that you are doing things well. Your mash is working, your lauter is working, your process is working, you aren't stuffing things up. All the planning and effort you put into trying to do the job properly was successful. The trick is keeping it up for the rest of the process and then its all down to recipe design.