No sparge mashing overnight

So I have done overnight mashing before with good results, but it only saves me about an hour the next day. I always only do my dry beers, saisons, Belgians, etc. so I am thinking of doing a lower alcohol saison for camping and doing the overnight mash with no sparge so all I have tomorrow is to run off, boil, cool and pitch. Thoughts anyone?

Why not at least sparge with cold water?
It will still rinse some sugars

I am not convinced it would rinse any amount of sugars. The grain bed will be set overnight and all the sugars should be in suspension. Usually I wake up and heat the sparge water when I am doing an overnight, but again trying to save the time. I have heard a lot of BIAB Brewers do full volume masking with no issues. I have ears both sides of efficiency also. Anywhere from needing 25% more grain to not needing it and getting 80%+.

Any sparge will rinse some amount of sugars, regardless of conversion amount, no?
The way i see/assune, If you can reach full conversion and pull 70% of your preboil volume and sparge with the other 30, (shooting from the hip), you would still rinse sugars, and get a higher gravity preboil.

There is no doubt that (all else equal), sparging will extract more sugars than not. By not sparging, all the sugars in the fluid volume left behind are lost. By sparging you recover some of that.

But, what mash efficiency you can actually get without sparging depends on so many things I don't think it can be predicted without some experimentation on your system.

You'll just have to try it and adjust on the fly - boil more, boil less, add DME, etc.

Yes sparging will rinse sugars. But that's not the end goal, rather you want the highest preboil effeciency possible for your system and the recipe in question.

@GavinC is pretty good about doing a quick write up, and just had an article (should still be on main page called "the efficient brewer"

In my experience full volume provides the highest effeciency, as it creates the highest mash effeciency as well as lauter/sparge effeciency. You could then sparge after your squeeze if you wanted to, but it would be better to have added that to your initial strike volume.

pricelessbrewing said:

Yes sparging will rinse sugars. But that's not the end goal, rather you want the highest preboil effeciency possible for your system and the recipe in question.

@GavinC is pretty good about doing a quick write up, and just had an article (should still be on main page called "the efficient brewer"

In my experience full volume provides the highest effeciency, as it creates the highest mash effeciency as well as lauter/sparge effeciency. You could then sparge after your squeeze if you wanted to, but it would be better to have added that to your initial strike volume.

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But is mash effeciency an issue with overnight mashing? With that amount of time, full conversion should happen wether at full volume or not, correct? And if that is the fact, a sparge would increase efficiency, even a cold water sparge... Not trying to get in a spitting match, but rather my own education.
I just struggle to understand how not sparging in any case would increase efficiency.

@madcow, are you doing biab, or just mentioning it as the fact that biab do no sparge?

madcowbrewing said:

I am not convinced it would rinse any amount of sugars. The grain bed will be set overnight and all the sugars should be in suspension. Usually I wake up and heat the sparge water when I am doing an overnight, but again trying to save the time. I have heard a lot of BIAB Brewers do full volume masking with no issues. I have ears both sides of efficiency also. Anywhere from needing 25% more grain to not needing it and getting 80%+.

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Assuming you have extracted the same amount of sugar from the grain, using full volume and then running off will reduce the amount of sugar you ultimately recover. If you mash, runoff, sparge, runoff, you will recover more sugar. See attached illustration of recovery efficiency with no rinse vs. one rinse.



I don't do separate sparge anymore, just add full volume mashout and runoff, but I sacrifice around 10-15% efficiency vs using separate mash/sparge volumes.

I do not do BIAB. And I rarely do overnight mashes. And I have never done a full volume mash. Most of my 13 years have been the traditional way of mashing. I am just experimenting with ways I can produce a great beer in an efficient manor and reduce the time constraint I have with everything going on right now. I have read many, many threads and articles on the subject and have seen varied results. I am doing this tonight and will record everything all the way through. After I run off while boiling (as long as I hit gravity) I will throw a sparge at it and see what comes out. Not sure if I should do a cold or a regular 170 sparge at it.

Not sure what your batch size is, but another idea might be to preheat your oven then put your mash in the oven after you're done. Will probably hold temps for a long time.

When I move to chicago in about a month I'm going to be doing small batches, with a slow cooker as my mashtun. wake up, dough in, set it to "warm/low" and come back later and bring it to a boil. All done, basically no work.

I don't have that big of oven. [emoji1]. I am doing batches of 5 to 15 gallon. This one will be only a five gallon. In the past overnight mashes I sit the cooler on a heating pad, wrap it in my fermentation belt, and wrap with a wool blanket. Not worried about the temp. I start at 155 and wake up in the 145 to 148 range. Works pretty good for my drier beers

madcowbrewing said:

I don't have that big of oven. [emoji1]. I am doing batches of 5 to 15 gallon. This one will be only a five gallon. In the past overnight mashes I sit the cooler on a heating pad, wrap it in my fermentation belt, and wrap with a wool blanket. Not worried about the temp. I start at 155 and wake up in the 145 to 148 range. Works pretty good for my drier beers

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Nice thinking, I like the heating pad idea.

I recall reading of someone who kept data on overnight mashes, I recall him claiming that the long mash and temp drop would result in slightly more fermentable wort and concluded that mashing several degrees higher was beneficial to emulate a typical shorter mash. Ymmv

I occasionally do a full volume mash, no sparge brew day. I brew 5-6 gallon batches, and for a normal gravity beer (1.050ish) I drop from 75% eff. to 70% eff. I just compensate with a little bit more grain. I also read in article (BYOB I think), that for lower gravity beers, the quality of wort is better with at no sparge technique. So I say go for it.

Did my mash last night and I ran off a boiled this morning. Morning was pretty hectic as I was doing an experiment with the sparge to create wort for my starter for one of the beers I am doing tomorrow. The below is the information I gathered from this mash.


Date: 8/19/2015


Grain (lbs) 10.375
Batch Size (gallons) 5.5
Full Volume Strike Water (gallons) 8.50
Strike Temp (°F) 163.0
Starting Mash Temp (°F) 156
Finished Mash Temp (°F) 146
Time Mash Started 11:00pm
Time Vourlaf started 8:35am
Time Wort ran clear 8:45am
Time Mash finished 8:35am, 575 minutes (>9.5hrs)
Target Volume, pre-boil 6.97
Actual Volume, pre-boil 7.00
Target Gravity (1.xxx), pre-boil 1.039
Actual Gravity (1.xxx), pre-boil 1.041
Measured Mash Efficiency 73.7%

Sparge water for starter wort (gallons) 3.00
Sparge water Temp (°F) 178
Extracted volume from Sparge stopped @ 1.5 gallons
Extracted Gravity from Sparge (1.xxx) 1.013

By my calculations the sparge sugars represent about 5% of the overall possible efficiency. It would not be correct to say that "you lost 5% by not sparging", since you did a full volume mash. But I'd bet if you could compare your full volume results to a partial volume mash plus sparge, it would still be close to a 5% loss.

IMO (since I'm also focused on cutting time), I'd say that getting 74% instead of 79% and cutting 30 to 60 minutes is well worth it.

But the most important thing is that if you can control all the variables, especially crush, you should be able to come close to 74% all the time on your system with this process.

Would you say your crush was relatively fine or coarse? How long did the runoff take?

Hex23 said:

By my calculations the sparge sugars represent about 5% of the overall possible efficiency. It would not be correct to say that "you lost 5% by not sparging", since you did a full volume mash. But I'd bet if you could compare your full volume results to a partial volume mash plus sparge, it would still be close to a 5% loss.

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If you see my illustration earlier in this thread you can see that you can lose out on around 10% of sugar if you no sparge (compared to separate mash and sparge additions of relatively similar volume). As I stated, I have seen 10-15 percent lower brewhouse efficiency since transitioning to full volume runoff.

I think my volume would have been more but lower in gravity if I added the sparge. My crush was pretty fine and had no issue with run off, it took about 20 minutes...the one thing i didn't measure.

I did a write up for Brew United with some info from BYO. Not a bad experiment.

http://www.brewunited.com/index.php?blogid=140

Thanks for the info. Let us know where the fg ends up being.

I really don't get the purpose of an overnight mash. Is it to save time?

it seems like all it saves is the 60 minutes of 'down time' during the mash on brew day. I use that time to measure out hops, get the rest of my equipment ready, etc. I'm lucky if I have 15 minutes of down time.

Heck if I got everything set up in advance, I could mash in, then go do other chores while waiting on the mash (mow some of the lawn, grocery shopping, change the oil in the tractor, etc).

Peruvian802 said:

I really don't get the purpose of an overnight mash. Is it to save time?

it seems like all it saves is the 60 minutes of 'down time' during the mash on brew day. I use that time to measure out hops, get the rest of my equipment ready, etc. I'm lucky if I have 15 minutes of down time.

Heck if I got everything set up in advance, I could mash in, then go do other chores while waiting on the mash (mow some of the lawn, grocery shopping, change the oil in the tractor, etc).

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I've done extended mashing (not overnight) and it's less about saving time than splitting up brew day. 60 minutes might not seems like a ton of time if you've got your whole day dedicated to brewing, but if you've got very young kids or something, starting your mash during nap time, and draining and boiling after putting them to bed can be an appealing brew strategy. Knowing how an extended mash will function can be useful information to have in your brewing toolkit if you are time(or even just continous chunks of time) limited.

I agree, it is more about splitting up the brew day. I really have had to ask myself on the times I have done it, where did my savings go?

madcowbrewing said:

Iwhere did my savings go?

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Agreed, the "savings" is the mash rest time. What a split session allows is flexibility in that you don't need continuos time. If one has available time Friday night and Saturday morning, a split session avoids staying up to ungodly hours, or waking in the wee hours of the morning, and another hours sleep to boot.

It allows a brew session of convenience, rather than forcing it into the late night, or very early morning. Some rarely have 5 hours of continuous time, but often have a couple hours at night, and a couple hours the following morning.