How much sparge water?

How much sparge water per lb of grain do you use? On my first AG I used 0.7 gal/lb and I think it was a little much. I got 70 % efficiency, but I want to increase that.

I learned from Papazian to use 1/2 gallon per pound of grain for sparging. I like to use a bit more than that now and I think .7 per pound is probably OK. If you fly sparge and you are using that much water, be sure the gravity of the runnings doesn't drop below 1.010. For fly sparging I don't think it will matter too much.

Thanks! That sounds about right.

I fly sparge. For a 10 gallon batch, I usually bring 8 gallons to 170 degrees and sparge until I reach 1.007 and stop. Most of the brew pub guys I've talked to stop their runnings at 1.007 so right or wrong, that''s what I've been doing.

So far I haven't had to use all the 8 gallons in my HLT. This is where the calibrated sight glass in the boil kettle helps to make sure I only boil until the volume is to where I need it to be to fit the wort into the primary's after cooling.

I've only been using Pro-mash for a few brew sessions and have been trying to fine tune my brewhouse numbers.

RichBrewer said:

I learned from Papazian to use 1/2 gallon per pound of grain for sparging. I like to use a bit more than that now and I think .7 per pound is probably OK. If you fly sparge and you are using that much water, be sure the gravity of the runnings doesn't drop below 1.010. For fly sparging I don't think it will matter too much.

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How do you hold to the 1.010? Do you put a hydrometer in the kettle and watch it while you are draining the sparge out of your cooler? I've seen a few references to this..just wanted to figure out how it's done.

davarm said:

How do you hold to the 1.010? Do you put a hydrometer in the kettle and watch it while you are draining the sparge out of your cooler? I've seen a few references to this..just wanted to figure out how it's done.

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It's kind of tricky but I pull the wort drain tubing out of the kettle and put it in my hydrometer flask until it fills up.

I pull a sample of the runnings from the MLT and then shut off the valves on the HLT and MLT to hold the sparge process and take a hydrometer reading and a temperature of the sample. I then use pro-mash's calculator to determine the SG with the temp adjustment.