bigger beer sparging

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thelastdandy

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i have had problems with efficiency for my last 3 batches (all 60%). i know it has to be my sparging. i'm doing brews with fairly big O.G.s (shooting for 1.07-1.09 on most) and the strike water isn't leaving much room in my 6 gallon boil pot for sparge water. should i get a bigger pot and boil longer, or is it alright to not use as much strike water (thus leaving more room in the kettle for sparge water). how low of a grain to water ratio can i use? the recipies i am formulating in beersmith are telling me i can only use like a gallon of strike water! do i just give up the efficiency on beers of this size? sorry to keep bugging everybody, and i know this answer is probably common knowledge to most but please help a noob!
 
I think 1qt/lb is the minimum usually recommended - I personally use 1.2. Not sure how you got 1 gallon of strike water out of beersmith, but that amount of water probably would not even fully saturate the amount of grain needed for a 1.090 beer.
 
i use 1.5 qts per pound, and with a grain bill of 18-20 lbs, there is almost enough coming out to fill my kettle without the sparge.
 
When you strike, some water is absorbed in the grain and wont come back out when you drain your first runnings. One thing that I learned last time and improved my efficiency (after noticing that I could drain another gallon or two of ~1.025-1.030 wort after my pot was full) was to figure out what my MLT's deadspace was.

This is with ~1.25q/lb grain in this example, btw. With deadspace numbers in hand, I added almost 3q more strike water to account for that loss. After the mash was done, I added about a gallon of nearly boiling water for mashout, stirred for a minute, waited 10 minutes, then drained my first runnings, and got almost the exact volume that beersmith predicted. Now, the grain is still very warm and saturated with liquid. Approximately whatever you put in will come back out. So if you want one sparge, calculate your beginning boil target volume and subtract what you have in the boilpot now. The difference is how much you should sparge either one time or multiple times. In my case, I sparged once with about 3G. My efficiency jumped almost 15% from my previous botched sparge attempts.
 
1.5 qts/lb at 20 pounds is 30 quarts. You'll lose 15 quarts to grain absorption so you'll only get 15qts out of the first runnings. That leaves at least 3 gallons to sparge.

You could also drop it down to 1.25qts/lb for the mash leaving a bit more for sparging later.
 
Why not simply sparge with a decent amount of water and boil for 30-45 mins before any hop additions to drop your volume?

That will carmelize the wort more and produce some different flavors that you may not want, in addition darkening the color. In some beers that is desirable, in some its not.
 
maybe i'll have better luck if i try fly sparging or only doing one batch sparge. i guess i wasn't really clear in the original post. i was left with about 2.5 gallons to sparge with, but was trying to split that into 2 batch sparges, and i just don't think it was enough to really do anything.
 
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