advice on no sparge brewing

Hello all,

I have recently erased sparging from my brewing sessions, and im consistantly hitting 65% efficiency which is fine by me.
I carry out full volume mashes and just run off in one go and fill my bk up and boil as normal, im wondering if there is any other way out of curiosity to up my efficiency?
Its a great way to brew in my opinion especially in my case where the only way i could up my batch sizes was to reduce to a 2 vessle setup, hence the no sparge.
Anybody else do this? Any advice?

Cheers
Matt

I have done BIAB no sparge and have hit 80% efficeincy. With the bag being the filter, you can deal with a finer crush and that is where you get the increased efficiency. You might be able to increase your efficiency by milling finer and adding rice hulls to increase the filtering like is suggested when working with wheat or rye which have no hulls.

Perhaps try a second "cold sparge" with tap water after draining the first runnings? No additional vessel required, but your BK temps will be lowered, thus take more time to reach boil.

If i was to mill any finer i worry about having WAY to much flour, or would this not really matter if i used oat husks? Apart from more flour is there any negetive impacts of fine milling? I have attached a picture of my current crush

Difficult to tell in your pic, looks to me like there are some uncrushed grains? If there is, I would crush finer. What kind of mill?

I agree, that looks like a very uneven crush with a lot of flour and a lot of untouched grain, both. I still trust my LHBS to crush my grains but since I do BIAB, I always pad my grain bills about 10% on the base malt and ask for a double crush. My grains are usually very broken up but not quite flour. More like grape nuts. I do my BIAB in a turkey fryer. I bought a 10 gallon aluminum turkey pot on clearance from Lowes and it came with the form fitting inner fry basket which is perfect for all grain. I use metal binder clips to attach my nylon BIAB bag to the inner basket and pour in the grains at 165f. I stir and also lift the handle on the fry basket up and out of the turkey pot about 1/2 way to swish, drain and dunk a few times during the mash. It's pretty easy to hold the temps around 155f but I do allow it to dip a little lower (to 145f) before re-firing the burner. I usually only have to re-fire the burner once during a 90 minute mash. At the end of the mash, I do a lot of dunking by lifting up the basket, letting it drain out then dunking it over and over again. No sparge. Using this method, i've been able to realize some nice efficiency in the 80% range (sometimes higher). For the final drain, I lift out the basket and place my homemade hops spider on top of the turkey pot, then just set the fryer basket down on top of the hops spider while it drains out and into the pot. I let it sit there and drain out until the wort hits boil, then set the basket aside while I add hops to the spider. Unclipping the filter bag and dumping the grains out is pretty easy, and then everything gets a good rinse while it's still warm to get residual grains and worts off of it.

wilserbrewer said:

Difficult to tell in your pic, looks to me like there are some uncrushed grains? If there is, I would crush finer. What kind of mill?

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If you look at my posts you will find one about my mill, it isnt a branded mill but one that my brother engineered for me.
Is there a way of milling very fine without getting to much flour? Maybe malt conditioning would help?

From the video, looks like you're milling way too fast.

Will speed effect the amount of flour that is produced and how fine i can crush?
I have always wondered if the crush could do with being tighter, but have also always worried about it being too fine and producing too much flour.
I have read people stating that crushes on require the grain to be cracked, but then i have heard other saying that you ideally dont want to see much grain if at all but i dont know how to achieve that with out getting a lot of flour.

Conditioning the grain will help. Wetting the grain will soften the kernel and toughen the husk so it doesn't tear as easily.

Can anybody tell me the best way to reduce the amount of flour produced from crushing my grain finer than shown? My run off is always crystal clear so im guessing that the flour isnt making it through so maybe more flour wont hurt?

MattGuk said:

Can anybody tell me the best way to reduce the amount of flour produced from crushing my grain finer than shown? My run off is always crystal clear so im guessing that the flour isnt making it through so maybe more flour wont hurt?

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RM-MN already told you the best way, see below...grain conditioning with a small amount of water. Lots of info here....
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/conditioning-grain-awesome-246906/

RM-MN said:

Conditioning the grain will help. Wetting the grain will soften the kernel and toughen the husk so it doesn't tear as easily.

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