wessmith
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 10/1/04
- Messages
- 855
- Reaction score
- 74
Thanks Mark - i seem to recall chris colby in that article he wrote about re-itterated mashing, having some sort of convoluted sparging regime that allowed him to get reasonably good (although of course reduced) efficiency out of that re-itterated mashing technique. I thought that might well be applicable to a braumeister too. But imo if you are brewing genuinely big beers you just need to cop it sweet on the efficiency drop no matter what system you are using, so its more about whether its possible to do or not on a given system - and it sounds more than doable.
One thing that might be of service to both braumeister and BIAB brewers who want to incorporate a sparge step, but dont want to increase the number of vessels in their system is something that i know is done by Spillsmostofit and was tested by Kai Troester... Cold water sparging. Yeah yeah... I hear all the howls of protest from the usual suspects "the heat reduces wort viscosity" "the heat dissolves the sugars better" etc etc various reasons why cold water sparging would be worse than useless. But as a matter of fact it isn't. Spills does it, Kai tested it and I've tried it and it works only slightly less well than sparging with water at traditional temps. I haven't tried it out on a traditional full fly sparge, only on BIAB and batch sparges .. and I guess it might work less well on a fly sparge, but i kind of doubt it. And what i have tried on a fly sparge is hot water from the tap - it works near enough to identically with sparge temp water so as not to matter.
Means that sparging in what would otherwise be a full volume brew, is a matter of the act itself and whether you can be bothered with it, rather than needing an extra vessel to heat water.
TB
TB, more than one micro I know has been forced to utilise a cold or luke warm sparge. Usually occurs when (a) the heat source fails in the HLT, or (B) the brewer forgot to refill the HLT after mash-in. In every case the results have been surprisingly good - not too much lost gravity.
Wes