Catt22

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...as the shouts of "so what" ring from hill to dale. It's a semi-free country IIRC; at least ours is or was.

thekingofspain

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I know its an old thread, but I stumbled upon steam mash heating when I missed my temps with my flash boiler. Made it into a steam boiler and used the braid as the steam inlet.

Wanting to take this one step forward however for sparging. Do you have to fly sparge (heat water and sparge) or can you add more water to the mash and then use steam to get to desired temp (Is there a name for this?).

Catt22

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The sparge method you choose is not dependent on your mash method. You could fly spage which is slowly adding hot water while simultaneously draining the MT at the same rate. Alternately, you could batch sparge which is adding heated water to the mash tun and draining it completely then adding more hot water and draining a second time. Raising the temp at the end of the mash to about 170F is called a mash out. Some brewers do a mash out and others do not. It would take a lot of boiling water to raise the mash temp to 170F and depending on your mash tun size, you may or may not have enough volume to handle it. I don't see any reason why you could not use steam to raise the temp just as you would for a step mash. You would need to stir constantly while injecting the steam in order to get the mash heated evenly throughout. I've not tried brewing with steam injection, so I cannot speak from direct experience. What was the problem with your flash boiler? Those are supposed to work well for mashing from what I've read.

thekingofspain

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Currently I batch sparge, but my flash boiler it pretty hard to dial in. The higher the temp the harder to dial in and the slower the water rate or higher the propane use. There is little adjustment or no adjustment from 160F to steam.

When I missed my mash in temp by 4F, the flash boiler raised the temp with out adding water in under a minute. Steaming mash is going to be more efficient that heating sparge water.

What I would like to do is quickly make sparge water at a lower temp. Then add the sparge water to the mash tun and use the flash boiler to take to it 170F.

With batch sparging I can visually see the sugars leaving the mash tun. Near the end of the sparge you can see clear sparge water at the top of the bed.

So I have two questions:

1# Will adding lower temp sparge water cause a major side effect to the mashing process? Read somewhere adding 70F sparge water caused beer haze but did not lower efficiency.

2# Will adding sparge water to the mash and mixing it lower efficiency by not rinsing the grain bed like batch sparging does.

The problem I might have is the mash tun might be too small to hold the extra sparge water.

The main drivers of this would be a reduction in total brew time and a reduction in propane use in addition to an easier dial in temperature.

kladue

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What method of fuel control are you using with the flash boiler?, I have a flash boiler setup and use a water side flow meter to set water flow and a needle valve on the gas side for fine adjustments. I use a recirculating wort system where steam is injected into the wort for temperature steps instead of directly into the mash, easier to hit temps that way.

BeerCanuck

Recipes 

Just reading over this older thread.
The steam ejecting mash paddle .. I need one of those

Cheers;
BeerCanuck

thekingofspain

Recipes 

My setup is a garden hose, through a whole house water purifier, through 50 feet of 1/4 copper tubing on top of a banjo burner, to some silcone tubing that fits into the barb of the mash tun or HLT.

My rig is simple 3 tier gravity system.