Stuck Sparge -- WTF?

[csh]

So, Lot's of issues here. Can anyone point me to what I DID WRONG?

I did an all grain batch a week or two back.. no problems. At all.

Today. I did an all grain batch, Northern Brewer 1800 Historic IPA. Grains milled. I had all sorts of issues with the sparge. The mash was fine. I hit 151F with a drop to 149F in 6o minutes. When I went to sparge, I added 2.5 gal @ 185F to bring the batch up to 168F. I never saw 168F but as soon as I opened the valve -- nothing. A drop. That's it. Stuck sparges usually give something... I got nothing. I mean literally I got like 2 TBs of wort.

I tried stirring. I tried blowing in the tube. No flow.

I ended up pulling off the wort to my kettle (with grains, etc), pulling my false bottom and putting that into the HLT, adding the wort+grain to the HLT+false bottom to try for another sparge.... NOTHING... AGAIN!!

Ok. Differences between the previous batch... I started using city water, not bottled spring water. I added potassium metabisulfate (about 1/8ts for 10gal) to remove chlorine. I'm wondering if the PH was an issue.... Maybe the sparge temp was an issue -- is it possible the wort was too viscous?

Eventually, I used a mesh colander to filter out much of the grain to get a wort that I could boil. Wort was super cloudy but I boiled anyway.

Is it possible that the grains were over-crushed and I had too much mud? There was a huge cloud of dust when I added the grains to the mash tun. This seemed "not normal" to me.

I've never had a sparge that gave nothing... A stuck sparge with like 2 gal in the kettle and more wort in the mash tun, ok! but I got NOTHING. WTF?

HELP? What did I do wrong?

I'm wondering if I had stayed with bottled spring water, rather than going to city water, that I'd been ok.

 

[kh54s10]

I would guess that you got a lot finer crush for this batch. Maris Otter should not present a problem like wheat might. And the water source would have nothing to do with the stuck sparge.

Did anything change in your hardware setup?

I use a 10 Gallon Rubbermaid water cooler with a water heater supply line braid and have never had any problems. (knock on wood!)

I also doubt that temperature would make any difference.

So, I would lean toward too fine a crush for your system. You might try rice hulls for your next batch.

 

[BanginBanjo]

The water temperature and the water used shouldn't be the cause of your problem here. I would agree that the crush was probably finer than it should have been. I personally have never seen a completely stuck sparge like that before, even when there's 10-15% flaked grains in my grain bill (without rice hulls).

My first question would be, how many batches have you brewed with your current MLT? It's possible there's a design flaw with the false bottom your using. I use one of these guys and have never had an issue, and I pretty much never use rice hulls: http://www.midwestsupplies.com/6-boil-screen.html

 

[Jaybird]

So, Lot's of issues here. Can anyone point me to what I DID WRONG?

I did an all grain batch a week or two back.. no problems. At all.

Today. I did an all grain batch, Northern Brewer 1800 Historic IPA. Grains milled. I had all sorts of issues with the sparge. The mash was fine. I hit 151F with a drop to 149F in 6o minutes. When I went to sparge, I added 2.5 gal @ 185F to bring the batch up to 168F. I never saw 168F but as soon as I opened the valve -- nothing. A drop. That's it. Stuck sparges usually give something... I got nothing. I mean literally I got like 2 TBs of wort.

I tried stirring. I tried blowing in the tube. No flow.

I ended up pulling off the wort to my kettle (with grains, etc), pulling my false bottom and putting that into the HLT, adding the wort+grain to the HLT+false bottom to try for another sparge.... NOTHING... AGAIN!!

Ok. Differences between the previous batch... I started using city water, not bottled spring water. I added potassium metabisulfate (about 1/8ts for 10gal) to remove chlorine. I'm wondering if the PH was an issue.... Maybe the sparge temp was an issue -- is it possible the wort was too viscous?

Eventually, I used a mesh colander to filter out much of the grain to get a wort that I could boil. Wort was super cloudy but I boiled anyway.

Is it possible that the grains were over-crushed and I had too much mud? There was a huge cloud of dust when I added the grains to the mash tun. This seemed "not normal" to me.

I've never had a sparge that gave nothing... A stuck sparge with like 2 gal in the kettle and more wort in the mash tun, ok! but I got NOTHING. WTF?

HELP? What did I do wrong?

I'm wondering if I had stayed with bottled spring water, rather than going to city water, that I'd been ok.

What kind of dip tube and false bottom do you use? It may be that your diptubes are a tad to long and getting pushed to the bottom of the kettle and cutting off the flow of wort? We see that from time to time.

Cheers
Jay

 

[csh]

After four AG batches, I was still having this problem. My problem was not that I had a stuck sparge, but more so that I'd open the valve and sparge wouldn't start. I tried a number of things to resolve this issue:

- milling my own grain with a known-good crush width (VISA!)
- milling the grain slowly
- putting all the hot water into the MT before any grain
- stirring gently (making sure I'm not forcing grain under the false bottom)

Along with the normal stuck sparge fixes:
- using rice hulls
- stirring the grain bed up after a stuck sparge
- blowing into the MT drain tube
- actually hitting 170F to loosen the sugars

After several conversations at my local homebrew group meeting and a bunch more digging around on the internet, I added the following adaptions to my equipment/process:
- reinforce the tube from false bottom to the valve to prevent collapse
- pre-fill the tube with water to prevent a "hydro lock"

In the end, I filled my MT with water to test that everything works with just water... and I had the same "nothing's coming out" issue. Nada. Valve open. Tank filled with 2 gals of water.

The solution was to use my mash paddle to squish the false bottom tube while the valve was open. This released the air trapped in the tube and after that, everything worked great. On further inspection, the L fitting on the false bottom is higher than the valve on the cooler, leading to an air pocket.

In fact, near the end of my real sparge, I let the flow of wort slow too much and locked up the tube again. After two more squishes, things were flowing again.

Chris.

 

[EarlyAmateurZymurgist]

Have you tried adding enough foundation liquor to cover the false bottom by about an inch before dumping all of your grist into your tun, slowly adding the rest of your strike liquor, and then stirring to ensure that the grain bed is evenly saturated and there are no dough balls? If you have tried all of the above and you are still experiencing a runoff problem, then either your crush is too fine for your setup or your false bottom is floating.