Fly Sparging Question

Quick questions, what temp do you guys use for your sparge water and how long do you sparge?

 

I heat to about 180F then pour into my HLT cooler, which by the time I sparge I'm 170 to 172. I try to sparge for an hour but sometimes finish sooner, 40 mins or so...forgot to mention that I do add some of the 180F sparge water to the mash to do a kind of halfassed mashout, between 2 to 4 qts usually.

 

I sparge at 170f and shoot for 45min to an hour sparge time.

Ed

 

I batch sparge and go for maybe 15 minutes. Just enough time to add hot water to mash, drain, repeat.

Oh, sorry! I know you were asking about fly sparging, but the time difference alone makes me suggest batching if you are interested in experimenting.

 

sweet guys thanks, i think we figured out our issue, sparging for like 20-25 minutes sometimes, obvously not enough time for the sugars to get stripped away.

so do we know what rate that is? ive heard a pint a minute? which is a gallon every 8 minutes giving us 45-60 minutes? give or take a little incompetence.

 

Depends on your batch size.

 

we do 5 gallons with 6.5 gallons for boil.

last couple times i took a reading of the last part of the runnings and it was like 1.018, so obviously we still had plenty of sugar in there.

 

There is a bit of debate about extracting tannins during fly sparging.
The rule of thumb if you follow it is to stop sparging when when the runnings reach 1.010.

So, you left some fermentables behind... but if you hit you volume and your target OG then you had a successful brew

Ed