The Beer Captured book and sparging specialty grains?

[linusstick]

I'm doing my first recipe from this book. When it says to sparge the specialty grains after steeping them I just catch the grain in a colander and dump the water over them right?

 

[Yooper]

Yeah, that would work. My preference is to have the grains in a bag to begin with, so then I just lift out the bag and put it in a colander and pour the sparge water over it.

 

[Msbeer]

I steep my grains on the stove top and while this is going on I bring the water in my brew pot up to 170 degrees. When the grains have steeped for 45 minutes I take the grain bag and dunk it up and down a few times in the 170 brew pot water. I then poor the water from the grains in the pot and bring to a boil.

 

[JSherwood]

Maybe it's just me and being an efficiency nerd (I'm sure with steeping grains, efficiency is the last thing to worry about), but I even squeeze every last drop of water I can back out of them. It never hurts to get the most sugars you can!

 

[TheSeether]

There is conflicting evidence that suggests squeezing can introduce unwanted tannins. The same evidence suggests that there are no fermentable sugars to be derived from steeping specialty grains.

That said, I squeeze mine well with no noticeably bad effects.