Boiling fly-sparge water?

I recently brewed with a guy I've never brewed with before. Heres the deal, I fly sparge with water roughly 168 degrees but in watching him brew he was using water that was almost a rolling boil.

I tasted said brews that he makes and they were the best home brewed beers I've ever tasted, hands down. His efficiency numbers are fantastic also. My question to everybody is, are we all monitoring our sparge temps super close for no reason? I tasted zero tannins or off flavors. Seemed so much easier to do. Btw he's brewed this way since the 80s and is VERY knowledgeable about brewing.

Im curious about your technique and if any of you brew this way. Thanks for sharing.

It's kind of an interesting question... if the sparge water is dribbling far enough through the air, and mixing with a large enough thermal mass of grain and wort already in the tun, does the grain bed ever break 170°, even if the sparge water starts out above 200°?

Maybe you should stick a floating thermometer in your mash tun next brew day, see what your 168° sparge water translates to in terms of actual grain bed temp.

Ive been fly sparging with 190-200 deg water for the last few batches. I checked the grain bed temps, and they were around 170 or less for the best part of the sparge. A couple did reach a bit higher but I was almost done collecting wort by then. My efficiencys are in the upper 70's low 80's most of the time too. Yet to have tannin or off flavors that I can taste, just my opinion. I was worried a bit on the first batch, but after seeing the temp hold right around the threshold of 170 I figured id give it a run and see how it came out.

I do this all the time, I have a 3" round thermometer with a 6" probe in my tun, I make 10 gallon batches and I know that with 190 degree sparge water that the temp never has hit 170 and I usually get 80%+ efficiency also.

So I was wondering this same thing. I mash out with boiling to raise the tun full to 170. Then Sparging with 170 degree water yields a mash of like 160 or less by half way thru the mash.... I'm sure this makes sense that we actually need to adjust sparge water temps to get the mash bed to stay in the Sparging temp ranges. I've used various mash tuns designs and tried batch and fly Sparging and settled in on fly Sparging because I actually think it's easier than the batch sparge method, but in the end efficiency is always in the 70-73 range.

At Mash out I Vorlauf for 10 minutes through my HLT embedded Herms coil. The HLT water continues to heat since I drew off my strike water and is usually at 180+ at this point. I try to lauter for 30 minutes or more and have not experienced any off or tannin flavors yet.

Just a heads up, I wanted to let you all know that I brewed a 10 gallon batch of a pumpkin ale this last Sunday and I used this method and I overshot my gravity. This worked perfect with no off flavors. I will do this in the future.