Not quite,
The first mash is fully sparged, but you only add enough wort for normal mash ratios in the second. You then heat up the remaining wort & sparge the second mash with that. Hope I'm making sense?
cheers Ross
That makes much more sense from a technique point of veiw.
I can see where you would get a mild increase in efficiency from doing a "big" beer in this way. But I cant see where it would be a lot.
Say you put your whole grain bill for 1.100 beer in at once . Just to pluck figures out of my bum, call it 11kg of grain and you collect 27L of wort @ a pre-boil of 1.085. That gives you 27x85=2295 extract points
If you batch sparged, your final runnings would be (roughly) 33% the strength of the first ones. Assuming the batch volumes are equal and you did two drainings of 13.5L that means your second runnings had a gravity of 1.038 (I had to do a little algebra) If you have 1L of deadspace and you lose 1.1L/kg of grain then you lost
[email protected]= 498 gravity points.
The higher the grain bill, the more you lose and the less efficient you become.
If you did the reiterated mash thing you gain because you reduce the grain bill at the end -- at the end of the second mash, your pre-boil gravity and volume would be the same, your last runnings gravity would be the same too because while you are using less grain, you added gravity points by using wort as your sparge liquor. It should all even out.
So in this case you would lose points to the first mash - doing all the figures it would be final runnings x grain loss (no deadspace unless you tip it out) 23x5.5= 126 gravity points
and you would lose in the second mash 5.5l to grain + 1L to deadspace at 1.038 so 38x6.5= 247. Total loss over the two mashes would be 247+126=373
So your inherrent losses (which are the ones that increase in a batch sparge when you increase gravity and grain bill) are going to be (498-373)/498 x 100 = 25%ish less severe using the reitterated mash. So if you were dropping from 75% efficiency to 60% efficiency, you would expect to gain back about 25% of the loss and end up at 63.75% efficiency.
So my ballpark number crunching says you will get back roughly 25% of efficiency
lost when increasing your grain bill... say your sparge etc work a bit better in a smaller mash and call it 30% But thats only the proportion of the
loss, so an actual increase of say 5% in extract efficiency for the brew???
Worth doing?? dunno.
If your mash tun isn't big enough for the whole batch, absolutely, but otherwise??
Not knocking it, not saying it doesn't work or its a waste of time, I'll probably give it a go.. just thinking out loud thats all.
Thirsty