EdmontonBoil
Member
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2022
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Recently, I've been trying to get more bang for my buck on brew day by (trying to) make small beer out of the last runnings of the mash. This works especially well with a larger beer or after 10 gallon batches, where there's a little extra sugar in the mash that may be harder for a hasty brewer to carefully extract with a batch sparge. The impediment to doing this originally was the difficulty of heating extra water for a sparge, but recently I've started throwing in around 5 gallons of cold sparge water out of the tap and I've been able to get between 1.015-1.020 (again, if I've got a heavy grain bill). After throwing in some brown sugar while heating the wort, it wasn't difficult to get something fermentable and drinkable by tossing in some extra hops on hand and boiling while I cooled my "main" beer. I also dry-hopped, to get a bit of extra flavor out, and used saison yeast to maximize alcohol. The result: perfectly drinkable session beer that took about 45 minutes extra on brew day for five gallons.
The key to making this easy for me, given my brewing setup, was using cold sparge water and being willing to improvise and throw in other fermentables that I have on hand. It'd be even better if I had a lb or so of malt extract, but I've been doing all-grain for a while now and don't have any on hand, so...
Anyway. Just throwing it out there for anyone that finds it useful.
Cheers!
The key to making this easy for me, given my brewing setup, was using cold sparge water and being willing to improvise and throw in other fermentables that I have on hand. It'd be even better if I had a lb or so of malt extract, but I've been doing all-grain for a while now and don't have any on hand, so...
Anyway. Just throwing it out there for anyone that finds it useful.
Cheers!