What's All This About Not Sparging?

[mje1980]

If you're gunna listen to anyone, listen to barry. More awards than most here, and loves making beer, and makes bloody great beer.

 

[MHB]

Interesting little exercise, glad you said you weren't worried about efficiency because that is going out the window.

Let's set the playing field, what you want to end up with is where you start from so:-
Target (for discussion) is 22.5 (5 Imp Gal) of 1.050 wort in the fermenter, made up of 12.5 L of wort and 10 L of "sanitary" ice. "insert raised eyebrow emoticon here"

Shuffling some numbers around, 1.050 wort is (roughly) 12.5^oP, or 12.5% w/v extract, we need the same amount of extract in 12.5L of heavy wort, (22.5*12.5/100)=2.8125 Kg of extract.
That means the heavy wort is going to have to be (2.8125/12.5 * 1000)=22.5^oP or from (SG= (^oP*4)/1000 +1)=1.090. that's doable, expensive, but you can get up over 1.100 if you really try.

Heavy worts throw proportionally more trub, so let's budget for leaving a good 2L in the kettle so we need 14.5L of 1.090 wort at the end of the boil.
Let's call your evaporation an average 10%, so into the kettle you need just a touch over 16L, that contains all the extract so your running's need to have a gravity of 1.081 or 20.25^oP (same dance as above) to give the required 3.2625 kg of extract. Remember the 2L loss has the same gravity as the cast wort.

Just so happens that the "first running's" form a mash made at 3:1 will be very close to 20^oP, (I'm going to be very lazy here and just use some quick rules of thumb because this far out near the edge of the brewing universe there is going to be a fair amount of guess and be dammed)

If you mash at 3:1, you get roughly 2 back and the grain keeps 1 (nearly)
You want 16L of heavy wort times (3/2) is 24L mash in and 8 Kg of malt (if you have no dead space in your tun).
Something like 55% brewhouse yield, doing rough numbers with just a good Aussie Ale malt with a potential yield of 75%

Naturally you are nearly leaving a beer behind; you might want to read up on "parti-gyle" and knock out a Mild with the leftovers.
Have fun
MHB

 

[Bribie G]

why? wouldnt you want to sparge your potential yield extract
i see it this way
buy a cartoon of any brew that you like open 4-5 vessels then pour them down the drain
do you now get why you should sparge lauter rinse what ever
it is all to do with recovery of sugars from your grain bill
dam ask any biab brewer

Here's a BIAB brewer - I don't sparge but get around 80% efficiency which suits me just fine.
If you use a method such as BIAB where you start off with the total volume of water you need then for most normal strength beers the little bit of sugary goodness left in the grains at the end is quite small and doesn't have too much of a detrimental effect. You can be very anal and do a side - sparge in a bucket with some hot water, but then you are on a "law of diminishing returns" scenario because you end up with too much wort that needs to be boiled down, to get you back to where you should have been without the sparge.

Rather than spend the extra time, juggling extra vessels, and energy $$$$ I just slip an extra fifty cents of grain into the bill to compensate.

However the OP is really more about chilling methods.

 

[user 10246]

Hey Bribie,

Do you use beersmith for your brewing records etc? Wondering what figures you use for mash profile if you do.

Cheers

 

[brett mccluskey]

Here's a BIAB brewer - I don't sparge but get around 80% efficiency which suits me just fine.
If you use a method such as BIAB where you start off with the total volume of water you need then for most normal strength beers the little bit of sugary goodness left in the grains at the end is quite small and doesn't have too much of a detrimental effect. You can be very anal and do a side - sparge in a bucket with some hot water, but then you are on a "law of diminishing returns" scenario because you end up with too much wort that needs to be boiled down, to get you back to where you should have been without the sparge.

Rather than spend the extra time, juggling extra vessels, and energy $$$$ I just slip an extra fifty cents of grain into the bill to compensate.

However the OP is really more about chilling methods.

+1 He also asked about how much extra sugars you get by sparging..Check out Basic Brewing Radio 20/1 2011 BIAB holds it's own in every way So much for the knockers of BIAB.. :icon_chickcheers:

 

[Bribie G]

Hey Bribie,

Do you use beersmith for your brewing records etc? Wondering what figures you use for mash profile if you do.

Cheers

I use Single Infusion, Medium Body, No Mash Out and set my water volume to 33L for most brews that I do. I'm not too anal about Beersmith and normally use it just as a scratchpad for checking recipes to see if I have them in the ballpark. My brewing records nowadays are BS printouts kept in a file, and annotated by pen for any other info such as pitching and kegging dates, temp etc.

 

[user 10246]

I use Single Infusion, Medium Body, No Mash Out and set my water volume to 33L for most brews that I do. I'm not too anal about Beersmith and normally use it just as a scratchpad for checking recipes to see if I have them in the ballpark. My brewing records nowadays are BS printouts kept in a file, and annotated by pen for any other info such as pitching and kegging dates, temp etc.

Thanks Bribie,

Yeah, I do a very similar thing here, BS as a guide, but lots of pen marks & my own written log to help with my mistakes.

I think I need to increase my boil volume to 33L as well, I seem to fall a little short for my final volume.

 

[Bribie G]

Goldy, getting a bit off topic, 33L is my strike water (BIAB) and I end up with a boil volume of around 27L according to BS - that's with around a 5kg grain bill.
However at a club brew day today I took Urnold and the kit along and did a BIAB demo and ended up with not only a 23L cube full but another 2L of wort which I took home in coke bottles to use in starters.
I'm thinking of scaling back to 32L initial strike. Guy at the meet had a refractometer and I ended up a bit light-on in the OG as the boil off wasn't as much as predicted. Just have to drink more of this batch to get me pissed B) B)

Do you go for a rolling boil or hard boil, and for how long - e.g. one hour?

 

[user 10246]

Yeah, I am still pretty new to all this, I have a 60 ltr pot I bought from Ross, I start with about 32 litres, but seem to lose quite a bit over the process.

I boil for an hour mostly & have a fairly strong boil I think. My efficiency seems around the 60-65% mark mostly too.

 

[Bribie G]

Goldy, as a couple of us were discussing actually at Ross's on Thursday and looking at those exact pots - they are not as tall and thin as an urn. The boil off rate is a function of the area of wort exposed to the atmosphere. For two ridiculous examples: if my urn was a kilometer high it would boil off exactly the same amount. However if a pot was one centimetre high but had the same base area as a swimming pool, it would boil off in half a second.

So in the case of a more "square" pot like you have, I would def. go up a few more litres of water.

 

[user 10246]

Cool, am hoping to brew tomorrow, will adjust a little for my squareness

Thanks mate