Three sparges better than two?

Say you have mashed the grains for an hour and then completely drained the mash tun.

Say, by your calcualtions, you are to use 6 gallons of sparge water to give your desired boil volume.

This could be, for example:

1 sparge of 6 gal
or 2 sparges of 3 gal
or 3 sparges of 2 gal.

I'm thinking 3 sparges would extract the most. Is there any downside (apart from more time involved?)

Also, why not do a 4th sparge and add this to the boil kettle, over the boil hour and cooling down phase, to end up with your desired final volume of cooled wort? (You could taste it beforehand to make sure it was not bitter.)

Cheers!

Usually it's to avoid leaching tannins out of grain husks from over-sparging - if your draw-off runs below 1.010, you should stop sparging. That's the easiest way to make sure it won't be too bitter/messed up. I usually do 3 sparges, but I make the 3rd sparge with 3 gallons, and then make a small beer with those runnings (usually adding some DME in the process).

You could easily do 3 sparges with smaller volumes, it's just that most people don't, because it adds time to the process.

Check on the efficiency of your mashing/sparging process with 2 batches first. If you're in the 70's, I wouldn't risk the tannin issue from above. Personally I get about 67% efficiency with two batches, and I call that good enough. I can live with buying an extra few ounces of grain to make up for that.

Bobby_M has a graph that shows that increasing from 2 to 3 batch sparges only increases your efficiency by 1-2%. I doubt that tanin extraction is a significant issue since the volume sparged is unchanged.

In other words, no downside (apart from time), but limited upside.

My experience has been: 50% of sugars in the first runnings, 33% first sparge, 16% 2nd. So, for a typical brew, a 3rd sparge might net me 2 points.

Many thanks for the replies! It's starting to make sense now.

That graph Batch Sparging Analysis - Home Brewing Wiki tells it all, doesn't it.

Does anyone know where the graph originated?

Cheers!

Octavius said:

Many thanks for the replies! It's starting to make sense now.

That graph Batch Sparging Analysis - Home Brewing Wiki tells it all, doesn't it.

Does anyone know where the graph originated?

Cheers!

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Kaiser on this site.

Here's his site: Batch Sparging Analysis - German Brewing Techniques

yeah that's Kaisers graph and data but I've linked to it quite a bit. There's really very little gain on a 3rd sparge and most of the time there isn't enough sparge volume to make use of it anyway.

I usually do 2 sparges if each addition is more than a .75qt/lb ratio. If it's lower than that, one sparge.

Just a note. Tannin extraction has to do with pH. When the sugars get down to around the 1.008 to 1.010 mark the pH is will be higher, as ph goes up as the SG drops.

I can't remember right now what the pH should be below in order to avoid tannin extraction.

You can probably get away with lower SG of your runnings with darker beers as dark grains are more acidic. Light SRM beers you have to be more careful with.

EDIT: After re-reading parts of Principles of Brewing Science by George Fix, I realized that the SG range should be no less than between 1.004 and 1.008 (1-2 Plato).

Denny's Evil Concoctions said:

Just a note. Tannin extraction has to do with pH. When the sugars get down to around the 1.008 to 1.010 mark the pH is will be higher and as ph goes up as the SG drops.

I can't remember right now what the pH should be below in order to avoid tannin extraction.

You can probably get away with lower SG of your runnings with darker beers as dark grains are more acidic. Light SRM beers you have to be more careful with.

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They generally say 6 is the magic number where above that you will start to extract a lot more flavor tannins.

From what i've gleaned from Kai's site, the fewer sparges you do the better the final wort quality is. Two batch sparges optimizes efficiency, but compared to a single or no sparge wort, is of lower quality. It's probably relative, though, as it's a balancing act in finding the middleground of best efficiency and best quality runnings. I think i might have heard this from Jamil Z at some point, too.

cactusgarrett said:

From what i've gleaned from Kai's site, the fewer sparges you do the better the final wort quality is. Two batch sparges optimizes efficiency, but compared to a single or no sparge wort, is of lower quality. It's probably relative, though, as it's a balancing act in finding the middleground of best efficiency and best quality runnings. I think i might have heard this from Jamil Z at some point, too.

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I don't think he's saying there is actually a noticeable quality issue with two or three sparges, but as you go up there is evidence of quality dropping.

I've found so little gain on even a second sparge that unless I have special conditions (large amount of grain in a small cooler, for instance) it just isn't worth my time or effort.

Denny said:

I've found so little gain on even a second sparge that unless I have special conditions (large amount of grain in a small cooler, for instance) it just isn't worth my time or effort.

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I've been wondering about this.

A thinner mash cuts down on potential dough balls where you can lose any conversion.

And with a single sparge - your volume is so high that a ton of stirring and a quick drain should get most of the residual sugars into solution that weren't in the 1st runnings.

hmmmm. I'll try this next time; a thinner mash and one big sparge.

Denny, how little gain, if you don't mind me asking? Typically i see enough gain with two to get to ~70% mash/sparge efficiency that i keep employing it. My runnings for batch sparging are iusually n the neighborhood of:

First runnings: 18% brix
*sparge 1*
Second runnings: 12% brix
*sparge 2*
Third runnings: 4% brix

I only do one sparge and I get 70% efficiency which is fine for me....

FWIW, I brewed my first AG batch this past Sunday, and I employed a double batch sparge of 3 gallons each. My total grain bill was 8 lbs, and I used 1.25qt/lb ratio for the initial strike volume. I ended up with almost 81% efficency (80.78%). I don't think that I would have achieved this brewhouse efficiency with a single sparge, or a no-sparge.

I just plotted my last six brews - I'm curious as to how my next batch will look with a thinner mash and one big sparge

cactusgarrett said:

Denny, how little gain, if you don't mind me asking? Typically i see enough gain with two to get to ~70% mash/sparge efficiency that i keep employing it. My runnings for batch sparging are iusually n the neighborhood of:

First runnings: 18% brix
*sparge 1*
Second runnings: 12% brix
*sparge 2*
Third runnings: 4% brix

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I gave someone new the standard 2 sparge mention, and Denny said that it's maybe 3-4% difference only doing one sparge. If time is dear to you, and the small amount of waste is not...

Remember that if you are only doing that one sparge, all the remaining water volume rinses the grains, so your first, second and third figures are only due to the amount of water used on each small sparge. Put all that water into one big sparge and then see what the final runnings look like to decide for your self.

cactusgarrett said:

Denny, how little gain, if you don't mind me asking? Typically i see enough gain with two to get to ~70% mash/sparge efficiency that i keep employing it. My runnings for batch sparging are iusually n the neighborhood of:

First runnings: 18% brix
*sparge 1*
Second runnings: 12% brix
*sparge 2*
Third runnings: 4% brix

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That's inline with Kai's chart based on mathematical expectations.

I agree with Denny in that the increase of 4-5% efficiency is probably not worth it unless you're already struggling with efficiencies under 70%. Then again, there are so many other factors to address in that case.

cactusgarrett said:

Denny, how little gain, if you don't mind me asking? Typically i see enough gain with two to get to ~70% mash/sparge efficiency that i keep employing it. My runnings for batch sparging are iusually n the neighborhood of:

First runnings: 18% brix
*sparge 1*
Second runnings: 12% brix
*sparge 2*
Third runnings: 4% brix

Click to expand...

Maybe 1-2 gravity points. For instance, last weekend I made a brown ale using about 13.8 lb. of grain. I mashed at about 1.6 qt./lb. and did a single sparge. My efficiency into the kettle was 89%. At that point, it's just not worth my time or effort to break it into 2 separate sparges.

Denny said:

Maybe 1-2 gravity points. For instance, last weekend I made a brown ale using about 13.8 lb. of grain. I mashed at about 1.6 qt./lb. and did a single sparge. My efficiency into the kettle was 89%. At that point, it's just not worth my time or effort to break it into 2 separate sparges.

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How the heck do you get 89% with one sparge?

I crush fine, I make sure my water chemistry and volume is appropriate, I don't have dead space in my tun so I get all the wort I produce. Look, this is what I keep saying....you really don't need to do more than one sparge if you look at your system as a whole.

It seems to me that most people who seem to have efficiency issues do not have fine enough crush.

Denny, have you noticed much difference with higher gravity beers and a 2nd sparge? I've switched back to batch sparging from fly to save time. I noticed a slight drop on most beers but anything with a reasonably high gravity tends to lose much more efficiency. I dropped from 90% to 75% when it was a higher grav beer.


I usually use a thin mash. I drain then sparge, resirc (RIMS) then drain.

Denny's Evil Concoctions said:

Denny, have you noticed much difference with higher gravity beers and a 2nd sparge? I've switched back to batch sparging from fly to save time. I noticed a slight drop on most beers but anything with a reasonably high gravity tends to lose much more efficiency. I dropped from 90% to 75% when it was a higher grav beer.


I usually use a thin mash. I drain then sparge, resirc (RIMS) then drain.

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Since I use a fairly small cooler usually, I've found that anything over 1.085-1090ish seems to suffer. That's just the result of having the cooler so full of grain that I can't get a sufficient volume of water in it to get all the sugar drained out. In those cases, a 2nd sparge is necessary. That's why I earlier posted "unless I have special conditions (large amount of grain in a small cooler, for instance)". Or I just do a no sparge in a larger cooler (I've got a 152 qt. for large batches of high gravity) and do a 2nd runnings batch, too.

Denny said:

Maybe 1-2 gravity points. For instance, last weekend I made a brown ale using about 13.8 lb. of grain. I mashed at about 1.6 qt./lb. and did a single sparge. My efficiency into the kettle was 89%. At that point, it's just not worth my time or effort to break it into 2 separate sparges.

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+1. I only sparge once.

I posted the incarrect min SG for runnings earlier. I added the following to the above post (#9).