I have read several methods on how to calculate this but wanted to get a general consensus. How do you determine how much sparge water you will use?
-Do you determine the ammount of water that will give you your proper pre-boil volume based on mash volume and losses?
-Do you just use a multiple of the volume of water in the mash and then top off / boil down to obtain the proper volume?
-Do you sparge until you reach a certain gravity of the runoff and then top up / boil down?
It seems these techniques would lead to large differences in your efficiencies and O.G.'s. If you sparge down to 1.005 runoff you are extracting the most from your grains. This would possibly require boil off to obtain the final volume desired and may be risky for tannin extraction. This also leads to long sparge times. To just choose 1.5 times the volume of the mash to sparge with (or some other multiple) may not lead to full extraction therefore giving low efficiencies.
It seems pro mash will let you enter whatever sparge volume you want and calculates your 'water needed' around that. This would lead to many variances in the process. What are your thoughts?
-Do you determine the ammount of water that will give you your proper pre-boil volume based on mash volume and losses?
-Do you just use a multiple of the volume of water in the mash and then top off / boil down to obtain the proper volume?
-Do you sparge until you reach a certain gravity of the runoff and then top up / boil down?
It seems these techniques would lead to large differences in your efficiencies and O.G.'s. If you sparge down to 1.005 runoff you are extracting the most from your grains. This would possibly require boil off to obtain the final volume desired and may be risky for tannin extraction. This also leads to long sparge times. To just choose 1.5 times the volume of the mash to sparge with (or some other multiple) may not lead to full extraction therefore giving low efficiencies.
It seems pro mash will let you enter whatever sparge volume you want and calculates your 'water needed' around that. This would lead to many variances in the process. What are your thoughts?