1st Ag As I Type!!

Quick question, when it is time to sparge (batch) Do i want to bring grain bed to 170(would mean i have to add XX qts of 210 water) or do i sparge with water that is 170 degrees?

Quick reply needed!

Sparge with 170 degree water. You'll be fine.

Thanks Ed! You are the man

if you batch with 170 it may take you into the 160s. I hit it with 180 and that takes me to right around 168-170

I know I'm a little late, but I go as high as 185-190 and stir really well. With a batch sparge, the hotter you are, the less viscous your extract will be and the more sugars you will get into solution (thats the whole idea right?)

Best of luck on your first AG,

Matt

EdWort said:

Sparge with 170 degree water. You'll be fine.

Click to expand...

Ed? You gonna be available in Jan? I want to come down there and kick your as...no, actually, let's go have a few brews...

clayof2day said:

I know I'm a little late, but I go as high as 185-190 and stir really well. With a batch sparge, the hotter you are, the less viscous your extract will be and the more sugars you will get into solution (thats the whole idea right?)

Best of luck on your first AG,

Matt

Click to expand...

Same with fly sparging. I actually add enough near boiling water at the end of the mash to bring the temp up to about 168 degrees. Then I recirculate and once the wort runs clear, I start the flow of 180 degree sparge water through my whirly gig sparge arm. This keeps the mash at about 168 to 170 for most of the sparge.
I'm not really concerned about mash out. I do this procedure mostly to decrease the viscosity of the wort so sugars are more easily released.

Semi-hijack here...

I'm attempting my first AG on Wednesday, planning to batch sparge. Do you run off all the wort, and then run sparge water over the grains... or do you just dump in the sparge water to get it up to ~180, and run it all off together?

i was curious about that as well george. I ran off all of my wort then added my sparge water. Not sure if this was the proper procedure, but i achieved, according to promash, a 68% effieciency doing it this way. i think it was this low because my sparge water added was only 174, thus only making the grainbed in the low 160s i would guess.

Other than that I would say the first AG was a success and am looking forward to tasting this Carmel Cream Ale i have read so much about.

In essense, the way that Cheyco explained it to me was to add enough of my sparge water to the mash (before taking the first runnings) so that the total I got from the first and second runnings would be about equal.

I was also having equipment-size limitations, without doing that I was going to need to add my sparge water in two additional batches, which I am pretty sure introduces more concerns about tannin extraction.

Denny Conn has a pretty good explanation of batch sparging here:
http://hbd.org/cascade/dennybrew/

the_bird said:

I was also having equipment-size limitations, without doing that I was going to need to add my sparge water in two additional batches, which I am pretty sure introduces more concerns about tannin extraction.

Click to expand...

If you can get the pH down to around 5.2-5.4 via an acid addition you'd be ok sparging with hotter water in the 2nd-run batch sparge. I use ph 5.2 and the ph of the sparge shows up "around" the 5.0 - 5.5 color of my ph test strips. and the mash ph is a closer to the 5.0 color of the test strips, like around 5.2.

I've got some of the PH 5.2 buffer on the way to deal with PH issues (honestly, I haven't even checked it on the first two mashes). To satisfy my curiousity, I also bought some of the cheap PH strips, just to see how far off my water really IS.

Yeah i shot from the hip the first few mashes as well. All I'm doing now is using the 5.2 - not actually doing any water chemistry.