I did my first fly sparge today and I ended up with a question. I used BeerSmith and the recipe from AHS to estimate the amount of sparge water which was about 4.75g. I rounded to near 5g and thought it would be enough to get my 6.5g for my batch. But I quickly noticed that my sparge water was running out and my collected wort was only around 3g. So my question was:
Is the objective of a fly sparge to ALWAYS cover the grain bed with water? Or do you get to a point and then let the rest of it drain? To put it another way, assuming you want to collect 6.5g, when you are done with that, do you still have an inch or two of water over the grain bed in the tun?
If you are always supposed to maintain that inch or two in the tun, then I would assume that all estimates for sparge water are too low and in reality you should just prepare an obscene amount of sparge water. In my case , I almost think that 8g of sparge water would have been about right.
Is the objective of a fly sparge to ALWAYS cover the grain bed with water? Or do you get to a point and then let the rest of it drain? To put it another way, assuming you want to collect 6.5g, when you are done with that, do you still have an inch or two of water over the grain bed in the tun?
If you are always supposed to maintain that inch or two in the tun, then I would assume that all estimates for sparge water are too low and in reality you should just prepare an obscene amount of sparge water. In my case , I almost think that 8g of sparge water would have been about right.