I've been planning my first AG batch and have been reading John Palmer's book fairly religiously. I decided the safest thing to do for my first batch was to follow the recipe and procedure for Oak Butt Brown Ale that he describes in great detail in the chapter "Your First All-Grain Batch." Here's my confusion: He recommends mashing at 2 qts. per pound, yet everything I have seen on this and other forums, not to speak of Beersmith's defaults, say that 2 qt./lb. is really thin - especially if the temperature needs adjusting. What I think is going on is that 2 qts/lb works out to about 5 gallons for the mash and 3.5 for the sparge. Adjusting for water retained by the grain, this yields equal mash and sparge runoff. Since Palmer says "batch sparging works best when two sparge volumes of the same size are combined to create the wort," (p.183), it is fairly clear that the 2 qt/lb ratio was chosen to make this happen.
OK, so here is the question. If you follow the formulas in the book, normal size beers (OG ~1.05 - about 10 lbs of grain for a 5.5 gal. batch) need about 2 qt/lb to arrive at equal runoffs (bigger beers get thicker mashes). Is the thin mash but equal runoffs more efficient than thickening the mash and making the first runoff smaller than the second?
OK, so here is the question. If you follow the formulas in the book, normal size beers (OG ~1.05 - about 10 lbs of grain for a 5.5 gal. batch) need about 2 qt/lb to arrive at equal runoffs (bigger beers get thicker mashes). Is the thin mash but equal runoffs more efficient than thickening the mash and making the first runoff smaller than the second?
