First partial mash, and a sparge question

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Tad_Porter

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Hi Folks:

My first partial mash is boiling away on the stove right now. All in all, things have gone well: my DIY mash tun worked like a charm and held temp well, the wort smells heavenly, and in 7 weeks I hope to be drinking a kicking brown ale.

According to Palmer's online *How To Brew,* I used 7.5 quarts of water for the mash (I had 5 lbs. of grain, and I went for the 1.5 quart/lbs.), and 11.25 quarts of sparge water (1.5 times more than the mash). This seemed like an awful lot to me, and yielded waaaaay more wort than I needed. I didn;t end up using all of the sparge, because the gravity of what I was drawing off fell to about 1.000,

My question is, do my ratios seem right? The recipe is for 5 gallons; 5 lbs of grain, 3 lbs LME, 2 oz hops.

Thanks so much.:mug:
 
Were you fly sparging? I believe most people stop when it gets to 1.012 or 1.010. So you may have over sparged slightly.

I'm confused about how you had waaaaay too much wort. According to the 7.5 qts mash and 11.25 qts sparge water minus grain absorption, you should have had only 2.8 gallons of wort. Am I missing something here?
 
Tad_Porter said:
Hi Folks:

My first partial mash is boiling away on the stove right now. All in all, things have gone well: my DIY mash tun worked like a charm and held temp well, the wort smells heavenly, and in 7 weeks I hope to be drinking a kicking brown ale.

According to Palmer's online *How To Brew,* I used 7.5 quarts of water for the mash (I had 5 lbs. of grain, and I went for the 1.5 quart/lbs.), and 11.25 quarts of sparge water (1.5 times more than the mash). This seemed like an awful lot to me, and yielded waaaaay more wort than I needed. I didn;t end up using all of the sparge, because the gravity of what I was drawing off fell to about 1.000,

My question is, do my ratios seem right? The recipe is for 5 gallons; 5 lbs of grain, 3 lbs LME, 2 oz hops.

Thanks so much.:mug:
Click to expand...

That IS a lot of sparge water. I'm not sure that Palmer says exactly to use you should use 1.5 more water- I think he says you can use UP TO that much, without oversparging. Or up to a total of 3 quarts of water per pound of grain at the most.

5 pounds of grain in 7.5 quarts is fine. You should have got about 1.25 gallons of first runnings, then could sparge with UP TO 2.5 gallons (.5 gallons per pound max) of water for the second runnings. Actually a bit less, if you mashed with 1.5 quarts per pound.

Anyway, a bit of oversparging will be ok. You won't harm the beer.
 
Ahhhh, I didn't get the "up to 1.5 times" part.

@Grizzlybrew: I may have done something a bit less than kosher: it's my first time at a partial mash, but I ended up with just under 4 gallons at the beginning of the boil, which then boiled down to, say, 3.5 or so. I was batch sparging, by the way, and after re-reading some info on HBT and in palmer, I definitely went about it in a bit of a unique manner. But my OG was fine, evena little on the high side (which almost always happens to me...not sure why. Maybe I'm not recalculating the gravity for the temp of the wort?).
 
It's alright. It's kind of like the old adage, "measure twice, cut once" but in this case it's, "read Palmer twice, mash once" :D

Also, similar to what Yooper said, I was taught to never let more than 3.3 qts water/lb. of grain pass through my MLT. Example, if you used 1.5 qts/lb. in your mash, you would use only 1.8 qts/lb. in the sparge. This is not ALWAYS the case, but is a good rule when you first start. This would have given you around 2.5 gallons of wort. You would then top off with another gallon to give you 3.5 gallons (typical par-boil amount) or another 3.5 gallons to give you 6 gallons (typical full-boil amount).
 
Thanks so much for this. It really helps, and my next partial masher will be that musch closer to awesome.
 

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