Water needed

Is there a program I can get other than promash or can someone help me with promash. When I use the water needed caculator it always says 7 gallons for sparge water I want to calculate how much water I will need to sparge and mash with as I do not know? Let's say it's 15 pounds of grain how do I know promash changes the ammount of mash water needed but sparge is always seven what gives?

The amount of sparge water is based on your batch size, not the grain volume. A 5 gallon barley wine will use more grain than a 5 gallon Pale Ale, but they will both use the same volume of sparge water.

Cheers

hmmmm... this is contradictory to Papazian, and I personally find it hard to accept, too.

If you have more grain, you will need more water to rinse the sugars out, right? Common sense says so anyway....

-walker

So, what if you want a higher gravity beer instead of a greater volume of lower gravity beer? Do you have to boil the wort for a long time in order to concentrate it?

In other words, how would you make a barley wine?

In my experience, it doesn't take more water to sparge more grain at all if you sparge properly. YMMV.

Good points there, Janx.

I probably shouldn't even be in this thread. I am not an AG brewer... I just wanted to point out that there is some reading material out there that says the amount of grain used dictates the amount of sparge water.

Brew on! :rockin:

That's why I was confused the papazian book does tell you to use a certain amount of sparge water per pound of grain. Like a half gallon or so. Which I guess does work out to be around 6-7 gallons. I'll just go recipe to recipe and see what the deal is.

Hmm...well, I'd like to ask Charlie how you make a barley wine instead of just making a LOT of amber ale.

I pretty much always make 12-14 gallons depending on when the sugars run out in the sparge. Sunday, I made 13 gallons of 1.074 wort for a Flanders Red. A couple of weeks ago I made a Pale Ale at about 1.055 and again got 13 gallons or so in the kettle. So, I used the same volume of sparge water in both cases, but much more grain in Sunday's brew. The sparge started to contain negligible sugars after about the same volume in both cases.

Temperature and pace are the most important factors in sparging. It's easily the most difficult and problematic aspect of AG brewing, and it's the easiest to get wrong. A lot of things about it aren't necessarily intuitive, and the idea that it takes more water to sparge more grain may be one of those non-intuitive aspects.

Or, heck, maybe I'm completely off. It's been over a decade since I read Papazian

For a normal batch I would sparge to ~7g volume and boil that down to 5.5g. Promash calculates this fine for my 60m boil. If I were to do a barleywine or RIS, say, I would need, as Walker says, to collect a lot more wort, perhaps 10g to boil down to 5.5g. However, with that you have to tell Promash that you will boil for 2-3hrs instead of 1hr which will lead to a much higher pre-boil volume which will reflect back into the water required calculation.

As Janx alludes to, if you don't increase the boil time you won't need anymore water to get to your volumes regardless of the size of the grain bill other than for dough-in (due to grain absorption)...sparge will be unaffected because no more water will be absorbed.

Janx said:

The amount of sparge water is based on your batch size, not the grain volume. A 5 gallon barley wine will use more grain than a 5 gallon Pale Ale, but they will both use the same volume of sparge water.

Cheers

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The amount of water will change based on grain bill as well. Promash calculates the amount of absorption the grain will take in the dough in. This in turn makes more grain = more water.

As far as actual sparging, maybe not SO much but you'll have a thick mash if you dont adjust your sparge water around your grain bill. People generally shoot for 1.25qt/lb.

Mindflux, I don't think a linear value like that can realistically be applied. If you do a volume of sparge water per pound of grain, then you really can't make stronger beers.

For example, if I make a beer with 15 pounds of grain and then a beer with 30 pounds of grain, there is NO WAY I would use twice as much sparge water on the 30 pounder. *Maybe* you'd use a little more and boil it down a bit, but it just doesn't fit into a linear ratio like that.

As far as mash water, you will definitely need more for more grain. I think we're getting the two confused. You'll add a lot more water to your mash initially, but in my experience, the sparge will not take twice as much water if you use twice as much grain. You sparge until it's done. Mine is generally done with the same volume of water per batch, and I have pretty good efficiency.

If you strike your mash with the correct amount of water, why would using less sparge water result in a thicker mash? The thickness of the mash is determined by the volume of strike water.

Janx said:

If you strike your mash with the correct amount of water, why would using less sparge water result in a thicker mash? The thickness of the mash is determined by the volume of strike water.

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Agree with this. But I also believe that with more grains more sparge water is required to rinse the remaining sugars. If it requires a certain amount of water to rinse out the sugar per lb of grain, then I would expect that number to climb as lbs of grain rise, though, as you suggest, perhaps not linearly. AFAIK, this is why the process for high-gravity beers is to runoff extra (for example, 8-10g for a 5g batch) as compared to a normal gravity beer.

I think within a certain range of gravities (say 1040-1070) perhaps the effect is negligible, but when you start getting 1080+ your efficiency will suffer unless you runoff extra wort.

Well alright if you insist.

I generally brew 5 gallon batches, this is typically 10-13lbs of grain. My total water for the whole session is around 9 gallons most times. My strike and sparge waters are equal parts (3.5 gallons, or so) and my mash out is usually 2 gallons.

For a 20 pound grain bill, the strike is going to be (roughly) (20*1.25)/4 = 6.25 gallons (take .11 gallons per pound of loss upon drain) = 4.05 gallons in the kettle

For the Mash out, you'll again use 1.25 quarts per pound (6.25 gallons again) however you'll yield about 6 gallons out of this.. netting 10 gallons in the kettle.

This depends on the batch size at hand.. but when Kurt (Sudster) and I brewed a Wee Heavy, he had a 20lb grain bill that was boiled down to 5 gallons. He ultimately yielded about 9 gallons of water in his kettle that he had to boil down to 5.

I can tell you that my 5 gallon numbers (10 pounds of grain) are rougly half those values (in gallons) in size for strike/sparge.

This also depends on the brew you intend to make. In order to get a 5 gallon 1.130 brew, you have to boil down 9 gallons down to 5 to get there unless you plan to adjust your grainbill accordingly. Even then your efficiency will suffer because of a thick mash.

BeeGee said:

I think within a certain range of gravities (say 1040-1070) perhaps the effect is negligible, but when you start getting 1080+ your efficiency will suffer unless you runoff extra wort.

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Experience tells me that this is true. I think the need for more sparge water is academic until you get into some seriously high gravity brews.

I know I can brew my rye with OG in the 1.085 range with no need for more sparge water than I would with a 1.050 Pale Ale. Since I get the expected OG, more water was clearly not necessary.

This is just another way the books tend to confuse first timers. I never measure the amount of sparge water anyway. Just heat a lot of it...more than you think you'll need. Then run it until the runnings are no longer sweet. It really is as simple as that, and any number of variations in our various setups will change the amount of water needed to achieve a full sparge. No one can tell you that you need x gallons of water per pound of grain. Your system will be different from theirs and the linear grain/water ratio is a serious misrepresentation of how the whole thing works.

Janx said:

No one can tell you that you need x gallons of water per pound of grain. Your system will be different from theirs and the linear grain/water ratio is a serious misrepresentation of how the whole thing works.

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Agree with that, too. Think we're on the same page!

BeeGee said:

Agree with that, too. Think we're on the same page!

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Me too...now if we could only convince Papazian to stop making it sound harder than it is...

Cheers

So basically mash with the amount that I caculate based on some formula then just fill up my hot liquor tank to capacity and sparge till it tates watery. The just boil it down to the 5 gallons I need.
Simple

voodoochild7 said:

So basically mash with the amount that I caculate based on some formula then just fill up my hot liquor tank to capacity and sparge till it tates watery. The just boil it down to the 5 gallons I need.
Simple

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That's pretty much what I do. Don't go too far into the watery tasting runnings. You can eventually get some husky flavors, but that's another risk that is overexaggerated by the books.

The key thing is a nice slooooooooooooow sparge. Really really slow.

The term "batch sparging" came from the old days when a brewer would Mash the grains then sparge off the first runnings. These runnings would be used in their "premium beers'. They would then add more water, sparge again, and make lesser beers from these runnings. Isn't that Kinda what we are doing as home brewers when we make a HG beer? Maybe we don't collect the second runnings but with the amount of grain we use it isn't much of a cost factor. I've never made a barley wine but if I did I would sparge with enough water to get my 5 1/2 gallon batch (after the boil). There would be enough grain in the mash that not all of the sugars would be released but for a Barley wine it would be worth the extra cost. You could do a second batch sparge and save it for starters if you wanted.

Also, when I mash-in, I add the water to the Tun first, let the temp stabilize, then add the grist stirring to break up the balls of dry grain. Wouldn't this be better than pouring dry grains onto your false bottom?

Janx said:

I never measure the amount of sparge water anyway. Just heat a lot of it...more than you think you'll need. Then run it until the runnings are no longer sweet. It really is as simple as that, and any number of variations in our various setups will change the amount of water needed to achieve a full sparge. No one can tell you that you need x gallons of water per pound of grain. Your system will be different from theirs and the linear grain/water ratio is a serious misrepresentation of how the whole thing works.

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Well said. I love the way you approach things.

I've taken that approach with my brewing and I love this hobby more and more.

RichBrewer said:

Also, when I mash-in, I add the water to the Tun first, let the temp stabilize, then add the grist stirring to break up the balls of dry grain. Wouldn't this be better than pouring dry grains onto your false bottom?

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This is how I do it as well, although I've done it grains first, as well, and the results were similar. What I like about adding the water first and letting the temperature stabilize is that you don't have to take into consideration the thermal coefficient (or heat loss) of your mash tun when calculating your strike temp...just the mass and temperature of the grains themselves.