If you want to do a full boil, just top off with some water after you do your sparge. That way you're not over-sparging the grains.
Using all your water for the sparge will work well with all-grain (it's a little more difficult to oversparge with so much grain) but with the small amount of grain you are using with partial mashing, you can easily oversparge with too much water.
Hope that is more clear.
EDIT: Thanks for the calculator...i'm making a spreadsheet now that I have a brewing laptop...less relying on promash, more understanding the math!
Thanks for the feedback. I end up mashing in at 1.5 gallons (3.5 lbs of grains). My initial temp when I added the grains was 160 degrees but I was able to get it quickly down to 155 degrees by adding two cups of cool water. I hope I didn't mess up. It's holding at 154 degrees for about 30 minutes. I'm getting ready to heat up the 2.0 gallons of sparge water and hope to hit the 170 degree sparge temperature. I'm sticking with a partial boil (I don't want to mess around with changing the hop adds) and will fill up to 5 gallons in the fermenter.
Into the fermenter it goes...overall it went well for my first partial mash batch. I'm curious to get some opinions on missing my mash temp, although I was able to recover to 155 degrees within a few minutes of starting off at 160 degrees. I was able to keep my mash in the 153-155 degree range for the entire 60 minutes but noticed that my temp starting getting up to 157-159 when I started heating up the sparge water.
OG was 1.053 compared to targeted 1.051-1.052, so feel pretty good about that.
That will help you hit your mash temp better than my silly "170°F" guideline. I've modified the original post to reflect this.
I did use that website and was about 5-7 degrees too high. I think it's just getting used to my equipment and stove. My efficiency ended up at 71%, so that is good.
That's odd. Are you sure you had your ratio (grain/water) correct?
Yeah, I had a 3.5 lb. grain bill, used 1.5 gallons, so 1.71. Grain temp was 68 degrees. 155 was target strike temp. Result was 168 degrees. I turned off heat at 170 degrees, waited until the temp hit 168 degrees, mashed in and the initial temp was 160 degrees. It's possible the temp was off or was in a hot pocket (or lean pocket, if you are worried about your weight), but I got it down to 155 degrees within a minute or two and held it at 155 degrees for the 60-minute mash.
Just tried this for the first time today with Orfy's hobgoblin clone. I enjoyed the process. Biggest difficulty was maintaining my mash temp for 90 minutes in my dinky, thin-walled, "economy" pot. It just doesn't retain heat well.
Wrap it in some towels next time...I use towels and bungee cords sometimes.
msujay, I would venture to say that the thermometer was just hitting a hot spot. It can be a PITA sometimes. If it's off and it doesn't make sense, I usually will stir it up, let it sit and take another reading.
Better safe than sorry, tho, if you're mashing too high...better to hit it with some water and get it lowered.
Wrap it in some towels next time...I use towels and bungee cords sometimes.
msujay, I would venture to say that the thermometer was just hitting a hot spot. It can be a PITA sometimes. If it's off and it doesn't make sense, I usually will stir it up, let it sit and take another reading.
Better safe than sorry, tho, if you're mashing too high...better to hit it with some water and get it lowered.
DB, thanks for your help (any anyone else who helped) and for this thread. I'm going to start doing all grain with my next batch and plan to use your stove top method and a turkey fryer for my boil. Thanks again!
Hi all ..I have a few comments...i have been reading the Aussi forms.and they have been BIAB for years...which means "brew in a bag" A page back you talk about having to much sparge water and releasing to much tannins ect...now they use full volume mash and dont have any mention of this..has any one been reading the BIAB stuff..they do AG brewing with this technique..Jeff
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