pumping from the mash tun

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MTHarrington

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So, I've been doing all grain 5 and 10 gallon batches now via gravity. I have a square cooler I've been using as a mash tun, and I batch sparge into that cooler too.

I've usually just let gravity take care of the first runnings and subsequent spargings into the boil kettle .

I've been thinking about adding a pump to my process, primarily to ride the wort through a CF chiller and into the ferment or and to move sparge water into the mashtun, but...
have been wondering if I could just as well use the pump to move my initial mash tun drain and subsequent runnings to the boil kettle..

Can I do this? or am I going to screw up the filtering process of the grain bed?
I would think not to run the pump at full blast, but to valve it down a little.

Any thoughts?
 
I thought lots of folks use it to recirculate back into the mash tun till it runs clear then into the kettle. I think you'll be fine.
 
I thought lots of folks use it to recirculate back into the mash tun till it runs clear then into the kettle. I think you'll be fine.

You might consider using it to just recirculate the entire mash time. This can greatly increase efficiency.

I would recirculate, but I wonder since I don't have heat on the mash tun, if I wouldn't get a drop in temperature?
 
I would recirculate, but I wonder since I don't have heat on the mash tun, if I wouldn't get a drop in temperature?

Could insulate the lines if you are worried about it, but I think the drop would be minimal. More than dropping the temperature, it just keeps it even from top to bottom. I could be wrong, but I see no reason why moving water would cool.
 
I would recirculate, but I wonder since I don't have heat on the mash tun, if I wouldn't get a drop in temperature?

You certainly can pump directly from the mash tun. I do it all the time. You will need to slow the pumping rate so as not to compact the grain bed, but otherwise it should be no problem. Recirculating will cause a significant temperature drop without adding heat somehow. The heat loss will be through the hoses and the pump itself and how much will depend a lot on the ambient temperature and the length of the hoses. You could insulate the hoses to minimize the loss, but probably not worth the trouble. A compromise might work best. IOW, don't recirculate until the conversion is complete and then only for a few minutes before transferring to the boil kettle. A brief vorlaugh kind of thing.
 
that is pretty amazing. I may give that a whirl next summer when I got more time. I can even couple that with a 3rd vessel for a sparge!

No need for third vessel. He put the entire mash and sparge volume in the system and ran the pump continuously during the mash. Fired the burner for a minute every 10 minutes to maintain mash temp, them fired it up for mashout at the end. Nice, clean simple.
 
I'm new to all grain myself, and I'm getting close to being able to make my first run hardware wise. I'm a little unclear on the sparge process though as I see you are supposed to use 1.25 quarts per pound of grain to mash then 0.50 gallons per pound to sparge. I assume both the mash effluent and sparge run off are then pumped to the boil kettle? That would mean for a 25 pound grain bill (10 gallon batch) I would end up with roughly 20 gallons of liquid which is way too high. Sorry for the noob interruption. I can wrap my head around the hardware easily but this part of the process is perplexing me.
 
I'm new to all grain myself, and I'm getting close to being able to make my first run hardware wise. I'm a little unclear on the sparge process though as I see you are supposed to use 1.25 quarts per pound of grain to mash then 0.50 gallons per pound to sparge. I assume both the mash effluent and sparge run off are then pumped to the boil kettle? That would mean for a 25 pound grain bill (10 gallon batch) I would end up with roughly 20 gallons of liquid which is way too high. Sorry for the noob interruption. I can wrap my head around the hardware easily but this part of the process is perplexing me.

Not sure where you're getting .5 gallons per pound to sparge. Generally, you sparge enough water to get your boil volume to where you want it to be. Incidentally your boil volume should but more like 12 or 13 gallons. Evaporation and cooling and trub loss factored in.
Try this:
http://www.brewheads.com/batch.php

Run the numbers and you'll see.


I use BeerSmith. It's very helpful. Read Palmer's book, it will help out a lot for all grain.
 
remember that 8 pounds of grain retains 1 gallon of water. that means in your case you'd have 17.5 gallons of wort.

sparge volume always depends on how much water you need. if you need to finish with 10 gallons you'd probably be starting with close to 12. so I'd say you need 14.5 gallons of water. 7.81 to mash with, and 6.69 to sparge with. that leaves you with 12 gallons to boil.

that of course assuming you boiloff 2 gallons in your boil. adjust to your equipment.

1.25qt/lb for mash and then sparge with what you can. I would say do a double batch sparge but you have little water to spare because of the big grain bill.

grains absorb about half a quart per pound. so 2.5 gallons will be absorbed by your grains.
 
beersmith (or maybe it was promash) says you lose 4% volume from just cooling. so a 10 gallon batch would really be a final boiling volume of 10.4 gallons. I boiloff about a gallon sometimes a gallon and a half off. so just there you wanna have a preboil of at least 12 gallons. more if you boiloff more.

add that to grain absoption and loss due to mlt design + anything you leave behind on the kettle and even trub in the fermenter if you count that
 
I have a two tier system, use a march pump to fly sparge and gravity drain into the boil kettle. Pretty simple setup, and I haven't noticed more than a 1-2 degree drop in mash temperature when recirculating. I recirculate only during the last 10 minutes of the mash, so it doesn't matter anyways. If you're really concerned about the temperature, just wait the entire 60/75 minutes for your sacchrification rest, then do the vorlauf. I'm impatient so I recirc early!

Basically, my system is setup so that the Mash Tun in the highest vessel to allow a gravity drain into the boil kettle. With one pump this is easy, and pretty bulletproof. I opted for some quick disconnects from McMaster-Carr to make switching lines easy.

Mashing In
Hot Liquor Tank -> March Pump -> Mash Tun

Sparging
Hot Liquor Tank -> March Pump -> Mash Tun -> (gravity drain) Boil Kettle

Chilling
Boil Kettle -> March Pump -> Counter-Flow Chiller -> Carboy
 
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