kevincad
Active Member
Biggest suggestion I can give is to try out beersmith software and keep reading on this forum.
To address your questions though, the general rule of thumb for most cases would be to mash with 1.25 quarts of water to 1LB of grain. So if you have a 10LB grain bill, you would mash with 12.5 quarts.
For batch sparging, I drain the mash/tun before putting sparge water in so my dead space is already taken up from the initial amount. So I take the amount I got from the initial run and subtract that from my pre-boil volume.
For example if I need 7.5 gallons to boil and I got 2 gallons from my first runnings, I would batch sparge with 2.25G twice to get the remaining 5.5G needed. This way I maximize the gravity without leaving too much liquid in the mash/tun.
So for the recipe given, where there are no volumes given, how would I know what the volume is supposed to be? I admit, I'm confused, please bear with me!