Is this sparging or…?

[PashMaddle]

So I was running a witbier recipe through Brewfather and wanted to make more than my usual 3 gallons in my 6.5 Anvil foundry (because I really like witbiers) and Brewfather spit out a “top up” amount for the water since that water would (presumably) cause an overflow or some other near catastrophic anomaly tied to me being a big dummy.

My question here is: what in the Samuel Q. Hades do I do with the extra water? I thought about:
1) Heating it to mash temp and sparging after my alpha amylase. Which I don’t want to do because it requires using the kitchen and that’s far away from the brewhouse (or “laundry room” as my wife likes to call it) and traveling that far while carrying hot liquids isn’t safe (children, doggos etc)

2) Add the water at the end of the mash and just recirculate it through my grain basket while it drains. This seems logical but there’s probably some sciency stuff I don’t know that will make it a bad idea.

3) Just put the dangdarn water in there before the boil and proceed to rock and roll. …this just seems too easy so (naturally) I question it.

Thanks in advance. I believe figuring this out will enable me to make larger batches and keep me in delicious beers for longer, thereby making me a much happier person… oh and I guess it would make it possible to share with friends and stuff too…

 

[RM-MN]

2. The temperature of the water doesn't matter a lot, it will just take a little longer to reach the boil but you will have recovered some extra sugars from the grains by doing it.

3. Adding the water to the wort simply dilutes your wort. Putting it in without heating give you the same problem of heating it without gaining any sugars.

 

[PashMaddle]

2. The temperature of the water doesn't matter a lot, it will just take a little longer to reach the boil but you will have recovered some extra sugars from the grains by doing it.

3. Adding the water to the wort simply dilutes your wort. Putting it in without heating give you the same problem of heating it without gaining any sugars.

Thanks for the info! I was leaning towards option 2 (rinsing the grains with wort… pretty much) but just needed a little bit of input.

The recipe and BF math is based off of the total water so wouldn’t the wort without the top off just be a higher gravity until the t/o water is added, thus bringing it down to/close to the predicted OG? This is just curiosity since the previous method seems more efficient and kinda more fun.

 

[RM-MN]

Yes it would be higher gravity and I have resorted to topping off my wort to bring down the OG to a more reasonable (to me) amount. However, my Scottish background says that I should instead be sparging to reduce the wasted sugar left in the grains. It's a struggle every time.