Question about sparging

I am in the process of buying everything for all grain brewing. My question is... IF I bought a big enough mash tun pot that could hold enough water to drain 5+ gallons worth into the boiling pot, would I need another pot and sparge arm? Or is it essential to use an additional pot and a sparging arm to efficintally wash all the sugars out?

 

You won't NEED it, but sparging helps get all the sugars out of the grains. You could also just batch sparge, which would not require a sparge arm and you wouldn't need a pot much bigger than the final volume of wort that you would need (so if you are doing a 5 gal batch, a 5 gallon pot.)

 

Thanks for the response. I think I'll stick with using a sparging arm for the setup I am working on.

 

I have two more questions. I have found a lot of websites that offer grains, I was wondering if there was one that was superior. I unfortunately live in an area with no real home-brew shop and need to look online. I have access to unlimited amounts of wheat and corn from nearby farmers so I was also wondering if those grains need to be malted to be effective?

 

most grains are malted barley or derivatives thereof (eg roasted or caramel malts). raw wheat and corn is raw form are usually rolled (looks like oatmeal) to be useful. wheat is also malted.

regular raw wheat ("wheat berries") and raw barley as they would be stored in a farmer's silo are almost unusable.

as far as what to use, there are opinions about which suppliers are the best. i am partial to weyerman.

in response to your question on sparging. mashing with full volume and not sparging is certainly a possibility. your efficiency will be lower, but you can compensate by using more grains. there are lots of different ways to mash/sparge.

 

There are a lot of online resources for purchasing grain. Any of the homebrewing supply sites will have plenty of choices for you. I'd be more concerned about shipping costs than anything. Grain is heavy and shipping adds up fast.

Try to match your grain up to your beer style if you can...weyermann is a German maltster and their products are best used in German beers. I wouldn't use them in an English beer - for that, I'd go with Fawcett or Crisp.

I can only think of one or two beer styles that would use unmalted wheat, and they aren't great candidate for new all-grain brewers. Corn is easiest to use if it's flaked, in which case you can just dump it in the mash tun with the other grains. It's possible, but more work, to use other forms of corn. You'd need to do a second mash to get it to convert, which is called a cereal mash.