Big F'n beer. No sparge?

I'm brewing an Imperial Stout (OG:1.099) with 24.5 pounds of grain. I normally do 1.25 qts/lb for my mash and then a mashout addition before sparging. For this particular beer that total volume of water will be greater than my normal boiling volume.

Should I go no sparge? Or should I lower my qts/lb ratio and not do a mash out addition? I'm leaning towards mashing with a 1.1 ratio and no mash out. That'll give me 4-5 gallons to sparge with. Just looking to bounce this idea off of you guys before brewing tomorrow.

Also, I have an 8 gallon kettle, so its not like I can do the world's largest boil. For the mash tun and HLT I use converted 10 gallon coolers.

You don't want to get too low on your ratios. It could lead to dough balls or worse unconverted starches. I'd say stick with the 1.25. It's puts you at 4.9 gal. in your mash tun, but your grain is going to absorb most of that water and you'll probably have enough room for a sparge or two.

Take your first runnings and see what you get, then sparge till you hit your mark.

Darpa17 said:

You don't want to get too low on your ratios. It could lead to dough balls or worse unconverted starches. I'd say stick with the 1.25. It's puts you at 4.9 gal. in your mash tun, but your grain is going to absorb most of that water and you'll probably have enough room for a sparge or two.

Take your first runnings and see what you get, then sparge till you hit your mark.

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By my calculations, 24.5 x 1.25 = 30.6 quarts = 7.65 gallons

I smell a partigyle...

MBasile said:

By my calculations, 24.5 x 1.25 = 30.6 quarts = 7.65 gallons

Click to expand...

The grain will absorb about 3.5 gallons of that, leaving about 4 in the kettle.

In this case, I might just skip the mashout and just use another 2.5 to 3 gallons of water to sparge.

You're efficiency probably won't be as good as normal on this big of a beer.

from my calculations, at 1.25qt/lb you will have a little over 4.5 gallons after draining from the initial mashing. Don't do a mash out, and that leaves you 2-2.5 gallons to sparge with. So you can either sparge with more water and do a longer boil, or decrease your ratio. At a 1.1qt/lb you will have about 3.75 gallons after draining, leaving 3 or so gallons to sparge with. I would still say just go for a longer boil and reduce the extra water.

MBasile said:

By my calculations, 24.5 x 1.25 = 30.6 quarts = 7.65 gallons

Click to expand...

Ahhh correct you are... stupid have I become. If yoda were to say it.

Bump your grain bill up to around 26.5 lbs, and you can partigyle 5 gallons of 1.090 big beer, and 5 gallons of around 1.045 small beer. That's assuming about 70% efficiency. No sparge FTW.

You can also do a double mash to keep the boil volume low. I did this once and it worked well.

Take half the grain, mash as normal. Drain, do a small sparge (like 1 gal). Empty tun, put in second half of the grain and use the wort to mash in with. Drain, and then do a small sparge to get the final volume you want to boil.

I did this for a 1.110 OG beer and only had to boil 60 min to get my desired 5.5 gal.

Big beers usually end up with lower efficiency in the first place, then No sparging would add even more of an efficiency loss. Unless you've done this before I would be against it.

I've been doing no sparge for the last 4 or 5 batches, my efficiency dropped from 83% (double batch sparge) to 68%...

This type of brew would be a tough thing to predict in my mind.

pjj2ba said:

You can also do a double mash to keep the boil volume low. I did this once and it worked well.

Take half the grain, mash as normal. Drain, do a small sparge (like 1 gal). Empty tun, put in second half of the grain and use the wort to mash in with. Drain, and then do a small sparge to get the final volume you want to boil.

I did this for a 1.110 OG beer and only had to boil 60 min to get my desired 5.5 gal.

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I would think you'd still have some efficiency issues because of the small sparge water volumes...just curious, did you get close to normal efficiency with this?

My thought would to mash the whole thing, but do a two part sparge. Mash as normal, scoop half out into a bucket, sparge the half remaining in the MT, replace the mash that you scooped-out, and sparge again. Not sure that is any better though.

To the OP: why not adjust the gravity with some DME and do a smaller mash?

Grains were already purchased and I only had one open fermenter, so that ruled out grain adjustment and parti-gyle. Ever since I went AG (this was my 4th AG brew) I've had low efficiency (mid-high 60s) and high boil off rates.

I went ahead and mashed at 1.25 qts/lb. I filled my HLT with 5 gallons of sparge water, and since I assumed my low efficiency was partly due to sparging too quickly. I slowed down my sparge and actually hit almost 65% brewhouse efficiency. I hit 62% with my IIPA and 67% with my pale ales, so I think 65% isn't too shabby!

In the future hopefully I can get a bigger brew pot so I can sparge with a larger volume of water and do a longer boil. Although I did manage to boil 7.5 gallons in an 8 gallon pot without a boilover!

In the end I ended up with 5.5 gallons of 1.103 wort.

EDIT: Bill, I didn't think about DME. I'll probably go that route for a barley wine this summer.