Imperial Beers - Small Sparge Water Worries

Ok, so this is a question for those of you who make imperial beers. I'm making an Imperial Schwarzbier (10 gallons, 42.1lbs of grain) at 1.098 OG and when i plug this into Beersmith I'm mashing with 13.8 gallons. With that it only leaves 4 gallons to sparge with to hit my boil volume. I can't help but think that this is going to result in a loss of efficiency and it isn't even enough sparge water to raise the grain bed to 168df. Is there methods you guys use to get around this? I've never done a beer this big so any advice is appreiciated.

Cheers,

LD

Within reason, increase the length of your boil (and thus your preboil volume) to give you more sparge water and raise your effciency.

And as far as reaching 168F, try removing some of your mash water, heating that, and adding it back. A very thin decoction, of sorts.

For bigger grain bills, I'll lengthen my boil from 60 to 90 minutes, which gives me an extra 1/2-gallon to play with (I do 5-gallon batches). I also plan on lower efficiency; 1% per lb for grain bills from 11-15 lbs, and 2% per lb over 15.

Also, keep sparging anyway and partigyle that beer. With that much grain, you can surely get at least 5 gallons of small beer out of the second or third runnings.

Part of my problem is that when i sparge to volume it ends up being the limit of my boil kettle. So i can't really extend the boil in this case.

LiverDance said:

Part of my problem is that when i sparge to volume it ends up being the limit of my boil kettle. So i can't really extend the boil in this case.

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Huh - as you boil the amount of wort in the kettle decreases. I have started with my kettle as full as I dared - then added wort as the level decreased. You have to watch for boilovers, as you can get more hot break when you add the wort to the kettle

For starters, you can reduce your mash ratio to as low as 1qt/lb for a total of like 10 gallons. At a .125 gallon per pound absoption rate, you'll drain off 5.25 gallons. Assuming you'll collect 12 gallons total, that's 6.75 gallons of sparge. If you're close to maxing out your kettle, you can still extend to a 2 hour boil by collecting an extra gallon and slowly introducing it to the boil and you concentrate down.

I agree that you'd be wasteful in not sparging another 6 gallons for a small beer after you have your first batch collected.

Ok, I see now. I though all volume had to be in pre boil but you guys are just adding more after the fact. Cool. I adjusted my mash ratio down to 1.1 qt/lbs and the first run off and sparge water are about equal now, which is good. I agree with not wanting to be wasteful but i've never done this before . How can I pre estimate my OG for the second batch? Or is it RDWHAHB and see what it comes out to be on site and come up with hopping schedule then?

Thanks,

LD

LiverDance said:

Ok, I see now. I though all volume had to be in pre boil but you guys are just adding more after the fact. Cool. I adjusted my mash ratio down to 1.1 qt/lbs and the first run off and sparge water are about equal now, which is good. I agree with not wanting to be wasteful but i've never done this before . How can I pre estimate my OG for the second batch? Or is it RDWHAHB and see what it comes out to be on site and come up with hopping schedule then?

Thanks,

LD

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Just take a sample of the second runnings and figure out a hopping schedule on the fly at that point. I usually do my small beers to end up like ordinary bitters or light milds, so the hopping stay relatively low, around 15-25 IBU or so.

I just brewed an imperial stout with an OG of 1.100. I miscalculated pretty horribly so my pre-boil SG was around 1.070. I threw in some DME and let it boil for a few hours and I wound up hitting 1.100 right on the nose. But I learned a pretty good lesson about sparging.

Typically, I've gotten (batch sparging) 50%, 33% and 16% of the sugars. If you hit 10 gallons @ 1.098 with the first two runnings, the last running should be around 1.030 and boil down to 1.040.

I can't remember the term for it, but on an old BN podcast (high gravity brewing 3-5-06) they talked about for high gravity beers splitting your grain in half and using the runnings from the first half as your mash water for the second half. Not sure what efficiency to expect, nor how to address it in software, but it seems like it could have something to it.

2bluewagons said:

I can't remember the term for it, but on an old BN podcast (high gravity brewing 3-5-06) they talked about for high gravity beers splitting your grain in half and using the runnings from the first half as your mash water for the second half. Not sure what efficiency to expect, nor how to address it in software, but it seems like it could have something to it.

Click to expand...

Reiterative mash?

I have good results with a nice, slow fly sparge on big beers. Of course if you are using a braid, that is out of the question...

Why is it out of the question if you use a braid? I use a 48q cooler with a ss braid and run my sparges 45-60 minutes without any problems. I'm not trying to be rude, I just want to know what you mean by that.

Well, if you're fly sparging with a braid in a 48qt, the assumption is that your efficiency is going to be pretty awful. Braids are single point of collection which encourages channeling.