Mash Lauter Tun or seperate?

I am reading a book and looked at some of your all grain setups. Some of you have three pots. The people with 3 pots have a Mash Tun pot, then a lauter pot, the a boil pot. Am I correct. I don't see any setups with two pots, which from my understanding one pot is the mash lauter tun pot, then a boil kettle pot. Am I correct on this setup also? Last which do people prefer out of the two?

The three you see are hot liquor tank, mash tun, boil pot. I haven't seen a setup that separates mash tun and lauter tun.

You can do a search on youtube to see what kinds of set-ups people are using. This is an easy one (cooler mash-lauter).
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMHLqnWCNjE]YouTube - Easy All Grain Brewing - Batch Sparge Method[/ame]

This brings up a related question. The pro brewers that DO have a seperate Lauter Tun... what is the purpose of moving the mash to a different vessel? I mean, do they somehow get more efficiency by transporting all that liquid and grain material into another container? It seems like they are just "dirtying another pot". Could someone please clue me in?

I think I somewhat understand the basics of all grain brewing. So you heat up the water to a desired temp., then you put it in the Mash Lauter Tun, pour all of the grain. Let sit for the desired time. then drain into boil kettle. If short, heat up more water called strike water. Then let drain into boil kettle and precede to do the rest of the process. Questions, when you apply the strike water to get the volume of water you need, do you let the water sit in the grains for the desired time, the initial time, or do you drain the water into the boil kettle right away? Also what an when is a sparge arm used? Is it necessary to have?

Don't forget to mix/stir your initial mash to get out ALL the air, let it sit for an hour or so, drain, then mix in sparge water stirring very well, let sit for maybe 10 min's.more or less, depending on your system and how it functions, doesn't need much as you are now "rinsing" the sugar from the grains. Repeat if necessary. Boil down to desired volume. Sparge arm is not necessary, just batch sparge.

So instead of adding the extra water at the end, you could put it through a sparge arm instead? Is there much of the difference between using a sparge arm or not? Is sparge water and strike water used interchangeable?

macabra11 said:

This brings up a related question. The pro brewers that DO have a seperate Lauter Tun...

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Um, I don't think very many breweries DO have serparate lauter tuns. The ones I've either worked at or visited had a MLT!

I know Full Sail does. But like I said... I can't imagine what the benefit would be.

Having a separate lauter tun allows a brewery to lauter one batch which mashing in the next batch...assembly line style.

Julohan... strike water is mixed with grain for the mash. Sparge water is used to rinse sugar out of mashed grain. Read my all grain primer as seen in the link in my sig below.

So is HLT, Hot Liquor Tank? Is this for just heating water for the sparge and strike water? Do some brew setups with 3 propane burners use the third one to help make the MLT stay a constant temperature?

Julohan said:

So is HLT, Hot Liquor Tank? Is this for just heating water for the sparge and strike water? Do some brew setups with 3 propane burners use the third one to help make the MLT stay a constant temperature?

Click to expand...

Yes, HLT is Hot Liquor Tank. You can either have a burner on it to keep it constant, or as people do on this site (like myself), you can get a cylindrical cooler as a HLT... ya know, as long as you use the water before heat escapes.

Yeah a lot of homebrewers have a MLT they can heat with a propane burner, but I just use a 12gal Colman cooler (fantastic insulation, keeps heat in long enough for a mash.)

I do these both so I can conserve propane. I just heat strike/sparge water on the electric stove!

So is a HLT not necessary to have? I could just heat up the sparge and strike water in a kettle, then put the water in the MLT?

Sort of. You're going to need three vessels no matter what.

If you want to use your boil kettle for the water, you can heat the water in the kettle, move it into the mash tun and collect the mash runnings in a bucket. After you're done with the kettle for water, you'd dump the bucket full of wort back in and start the boil.

You can also heat up the water and hold it in an insulated vessel like a cooler so that you can collect your runnings directly into the kettle. This gives you a small time advantage because you can get the flame onto the wort quicker.

Bobby, do commercial breweries pump the entire mash into the lauter vessel and sparge there?

For the ones with a separate lauter tun, yes. It seems like a major pain in the ass to me.

Agreed... and if they need more capacity, why not just have two MLT's...