Fly sparging with a steel mesh?

My mash/lauter ton is a 36 quart coleman extreme with one of those plumbing steel meshes--the atypical batch sparge setup. I'm interested in trying fly sparging, but according to Palmer's book, efficiency suffers with this set up as the grain bed can get channeled and sugars can accumulate in the corners--thus the need for a false bottom.

Is fly sparging worth trying for my existing mash tun? Any tips? Thanks!

Ben :rockin:

From what I understand, Palmer is correct. You'll want to build a proper manifold for fly sparging.

Just curious, what's the impetus to fly sparge?

I've been fly sparging with a steel braid in a 70qt Coleman Xtreme cooler and have been routinely getting around 82-84% efficiency. When I made my porter last time, around a 32lb grain bill, I actually got 90% and had to sparge an extra gallon to get my pre-boil gravity to where I wanted it.

944play said:

Just curious, what's the impetus to fly sparge?

Click to expand...

Well if I were to try to make a barley wine or imperial stout with a 20lb + grain bill, my cooler quickly runs out of room. I've been averaging around 65% on my batch sparging, so I don't even know if it would be possible to make a "big" beer with my mash tun size and current efficiencies. Could be wrong about that though....