Fly Sparge for a Barley Wine?

[geniz]

I'm looking to do an AG, 5 gal batch of barley wine.
Im doing a modified version of Jamil's English Barley Wine recipe.

OG at 60% efficiency will be 1.104 with 23lbs of grain.
According to BeerSmith, I need 9.6 gallons of water to get 6.7 gal pre boil volume.

I have a 10gal igloo cooler mash tun.
I cannot fit 9.6 gal of water and 23lbs of grain in that mash tun.

Can I mash in with say, 6 gallons of water (1.04 qt/lb) and after conversion, do a fly sparge of the remaining 3.6 gal of water (at 170 degrees) while draining off my "first runnings"?

How would this be different than doing a full volume, "thinner" mash in a larger mash tun. I really dont want to have to convert a larger cooler if I can get away with it.

Anyone have any experience with doing this?

 

[beerkrump]

You have a couple of choices:
1) do a smaller batch
2) get a bigger cooler
3) do a double partigyle - put half your grains in the tun and take only the first runnings to the brew kettle. Put the rest of the runnings into some clean buckets or containers. Repeat. You should end up with a batch of 1.100 SG and a batch of 1.045 SG ale. You'll just need to find about 7 gallons worth of empty containers.

 

[Northcalais40]

I don't see why you can't mash with 1 qt/lb then sparge as usual. A fly sparge will work well only if you have the type of MLT manifold that is required. Otherwise batch sparge and assume a low efficiency. Another tact is to double batch sparge and collect more wort than you want and boil it down to the final volume.

But yes, I think that a fly sparge as you describe will be just fine, provided that your gear is set up for that.

But you will necessarily have a lower efficiency than with a 1.060 OG recipe.