Batch Sparging Help

I did my first AG batch last night, Ive been doing extract for a few years and finally decided to move up. I have a few questions though.

I did an imperial IPA with 14 pounds of grain, thats about 4.2 gallons of mash water. If I wanted to end up with 6 gallons in the boil that does not leave much water to sparge with...what should i do? I ended up doing smaller sparge sets until I reached a volume of 6 gallons but I know I can over sparge grains so I don't want to do this.

What temp should I heat the water up to before I dump in to sparge (do I need to heat sparge water up to compensate for cooling like mash-water) and about what volume and how many sparges should I do after releasing the initial mash wort?

Also, how fast should I let the wort and sparge water exit the grains by regulating the ball lock. I know with fly sparging you do it pretty slow but what about batch sparging?

Thanks all, much appreciated

U might want to double check your mash water volume. I've always heard general rule of thumb is 1qt per pound of grain. So. That would be more like 3.5 gal.

you can compensate for efficiency loss by adding more grain, or you can sparge more and boil a little longer. you could go with a 90 minute boil and that would give you more water to sparge with.

what i normally do is measure my first runnings and split whatever volume i need to get up to preboil (7.5 gal in my case) into two batch sparges. i normally heat up the water to 185-195 for sparging so i get the grain bed up as close to 168 or so as possible.

i've heard that in batch sparging, you want the wort to come out as fast as possible. i don't know if that's accurate, but it's how i do it and seems to work great for me.

Also a lot of that gets lost to grain absorption. So u should have plenty to sparge with.

Is there a disadvantage to doing 3 sparges instead of 2? Is 2 the going standard for the procedure?

shot0rum247 said:

Is there a disadvantage to doing 3 sparges instead of 2? Is 2 the going standard for the procedure?

Click to expand...

Here's an analysis of batch sparging:
http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?title=Batch_Sparging_Analysis

and also check out his main page - lots of interesting stuff:
http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

and Denny's page on batch sparging:
http://hbd.org/cascade/dennybrew/

thanks a lot guys. Although this batch went fairly smoothly (with the exception of my thermometer and my backup thermometer breaking at the same time as I was cooling after boil) I think next time will be even better.

Hey guys, quick sparging question for a partial mash/extract with grains brewer. I've tried a couple recipes that use a cereal mash where I've mashed some grains in a bag in the brew kettle as well as in a separate kettle then combined them, pouring the hot cereal mash over the grain bag in the main brew kettle.

Question I have, if I'm going to do a SMaSH and have one or 2 grain bags steeping in the brewpot, what would result from using cold water to rinse the grain bags into the brewpot to wash the sugars into the kettle? Obviously it would take longer to bring it to boiling, but would using cold water versus hot affect the starch conversion at all?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Burro2882 said:

Also a lot of that gets lost to grain absorption. So u should have plenty to sparge with.

Click to expand...

That's what i was going to suggest, too. With my system, i think i'm in the neighborhood of 0.12gal/lb absorption. It might go without saying, but you also don't keep factoring that it, cuz once the grains have absorbed the strike water, they'll retain that much water despite the amount of sparge water added each round.

Slowfro said:

Hey guys, quick sparging question for a partial mash/extract with grains brewer. I've tried a couple recipes that use a cereal mash where I've mashed some grains in a bag in the brew kettle as well as in a separate kettle then combined them, pouring the hot cereal mash over the grain bag in the main brew kettle.

Question I have, if I'm going to do a SMaSH and have one or 2 grain bags steeping in the brewpot, what would result from using cold water to rinse the grain bags into the brewpot to wash the sugars into the kettle? Obviously it would take longer to bring it to boiling, but would using cold water versus hot affect the starch conversion at all?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Click to expand...

The cold water won't rinse the grains well AT ALL. You need hot water to dissolve out the sugars and rinse them off.

Pick a sweet beer, let a bit of it dry on a spoon over night. Then rinse some cold water over it...beer won't go away. Hit it with some hot water, and that sticky goodness will be gone.