Quick question! (I forgot to heat my sparge water)

So, I am brewing after a long day of work, and just started my 10 minute mash out, and realized that I completely forgot to turn the burner on under my 4.4 gallons of sparge water. What would be worse? Letting the mash sit for another half hour or so, or sparging with water that is way under the 168 degrees that beersmith calculated?

I am using a 10 gallon beverage cooler with mesh hose as a mash tun, and the beer is 1.048 SG hefeweizen with .5lbs rice hulls added.

have read on here that if you are batch sparging and going right to boil, it is not as critical to have the sparge water in the 168-170 range. Going straight to boil gets you up to temp to stop the conversion process. It will have some effect on the solubility of the sugars though, hot water picks up more sugar, so you will loose some efficiency.

spokaniac said:

have read on here that if you are batch sparging and going right to boil, it is not as critical to have the sparge water in the 168-170 range. Going straight to boil gets you up to temp to stop the conversion process. It will have some effect on the solubility of the sugars though, hot water picks up more sugar, so you will loose some efficiency.

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That's what I figured with the efficiency. If there is no harm letting the mash sit for an extra half hour, I would rather do that.

If you're batch sparging, go ahead and sparge with cool water. Well, even if you're fly sparging, you could sparge with cool water, but I've never done that!

If you've reached mash out temps, it really doesn't matter if you sparge with cool water or not.

Yooper said:

If you're batch sparging, go ahead and sparge with cool water. Well, even if you're fly sparging, you could sparge with cool water, but I've never done that!

If you've reached mash out temps, it really doesn't matter if you sparge with cool water or not.

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Awesome, thanks. I was fly sparging. I kind of split the difference. I went an extra 10 minutes and fly sparged with the water at about 150 degrees. My efficiency may have suffered a little bit, but nothing crazy.

BrakeleyBrewing said:

Awesome, thanks. I was fly sparging. I kind of split the difference. I went an extra 10 minutes and fly sparged with the water at about 150 degrees. My efficiency may have suffered a little bit, but nothing crazy.

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I saw some experiments by Kai Troester where he sparged with cool water and it did not impact efficiency, although in theory you would get slightly better efficiency with a hotter sparge due to the solubility of sugars in warmer water.

Since the process of fly sparging relies on the diffusion principle, I don't know if warmer water would matter in efficiency but once you reach mash out temps it's just as easy to sparge with warmer water as cool so I've never tried it!

Interesting. I would think that if the the water was too cold, it would not be able to dissolve the sugars enough, impacting efficiency. You are saying this doesn't happen as long as you reach mash out temps?

Yooper said:

If you're batch sparging, go ahead and sparge with cool water. Well, even if you're fly sparging, you could sparge with cool water, but I've never done that!

If you've reached mash out temps, it really doesn't matter if you sparge with cool water or not.

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Do you or anyone else know how this affects efficiency. If its negligible why waste the effort heating the water?
* just noticed your add on -thanks. I would guess as long is the water isn't cold; warm would be ok but I'm still a rookie.

Well, i guess it would depend on the definition of "warm?" I try to keep the sparge water between at least 160 and 170, but I never sparge with anything colder. Just worrying about decreased efficiency below the 160 mark.

MaynardX said:

Well, i guess it would depend on the definition of "warm?" I try to keep the sparge water between at least 160 and 170, but I never sparge with anything colder. Just worrying about decreased efficiency below the 160 mark.

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Well, I just did a 4.4 gallon fly sparge at about 150 degrees and got 70% efficiency. I usually get between 70 and 75 percent, but I have only done about 6 all grain batches so far, so it's hard to say what effect it may have had.

MaynardX said:

Interesting. I would think that if the the water was too cold, it would not be able to dissolve the sugars enough, impacting efficiency. You are saying this doesn't happen as long as you reach mash out temps?

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Sure, water is a better solvent when it's hotter. BUT, there's not enough sugar to even approach the maximum solubility levels when the water is cold, so on a practical level it doesn't really matter. I've forgotten to heat my sparge water a couple times and used it cold (probably ~65*F) it didn't have any effect at all.