BIAB Verlauf/fly sparge *Theoretical thread*

[Cider123]

We can put this whole thing to rest by everyone chipping in a few bucks and buying the OP a 60 qt kettle. Then he can mash in full volume strike water and not worry about any sparge foolishness

 

[ArcLight]

I take exception to this, assuming a normal gravity beer one can achieve 80 plus efficiency, to blanket statement that a dunk sparge adds 10% is a stretch.

I understand you love dunk sparging, but claims of 10% gain regardless of gravity are optimistic and unrealistic.

When I crush tight, and measure the Brix with my refractometer, and compare it to a full volume mash, especially the more grain I use, I see a 10% improvement.
This isn't made up, I've witnessed it repeatedly.

Now maybe if one it making a beer with less grain, say 8 pounds, there would be less difference.
But the more grain you use, the more the dunk sparge helps, compared to a full volume mash.

In fact, next time I brew, I'll try the "old" way, - full volume mash, and compare the gravity. I'll make the sacrifice of 0.5-0.7% alcohol in my Citra IPA, as an xBeeriment.

(Years ago I posted this on one of the Australian BIAB forums, their general response was to use an extra pound of grain, and stay with the full volume. They don't realize how expensive 2 row is here. Save 75 cents here and there and pretty soon you could open your own brewery, or just buy an existing one like Stone or Sierra Nevada)

 

[ol-hazza]

This thread got painful really fast.

It was made worse by the fact for the last 3 days I have been trying to follow it on my phone with its tiny wee screen and keyboard and probably haven't been replying with as much detail as I should have.

I think people should have a good read of what has being said previously in a thread before commenting. For example this was not a thread about dunk sparging. That should be quite clear from title for starters.

There are two things I wish that I had clarified earlier. Firstly that my worries about Trub in the fermenter were not a problem in itself but rather a symptom of too much gunk in the wort pre boil. Maybe I get the same as everyone else and can't improve this to any degree that is worth it with a vorlauf, maybe I can. I feel like doing the experiment now just to see how much of an effect it has.

That might be a waste of time and money in your books but I like the thinking side of brewing, and the easiest solution isn't necessarily the most satisfying.

Secondly I was aware that I'm not going to be able to, nor would I want to eliminate hot and cold break.

Like all good threads though it has bought up a new question that will help answer my other questions.

How much trub do other people get in their fermenters? If you dump your full boil into the fermenter

For instance my current batch has about 4l of trub and yeast and a total batch size of 23L. Been in the fermenter for about 8 days at 20°

4.5kg grain bill
70g of pellet hops (most of these should have been caught in a sieve when going into the fermenter, usually about 1/2 cups worth)
1 whirfloc tablet for kettle finings
60 minute boil
1 sachet of US-05 rehydrated yeast.

Can I just stress that I'm not worried about having trub in my fermenter.

 

[pricelessbrewing]

My second to last brew session I chilled, whirlpooled, and let it sit for about ten minutes, drained from a ball valve and tried to filter through a Swiss voile hop bag from wilser. I before I got to the hot/cold break I caught absolutely nothing till the last quart or so of material in the kettle, and filtering then compressing thay between two bowls gained me about a two cups of liquid. I imagine that's about as effective as you'll get aside from doing as I said in the last post and cold crashing before fermentation begins.

I'd say hot/cold break maybe makes up about 5% by volume of post boil. So 5.5 gallons yields about 1 quart of break material. Fermentation produces around 10% trub or so, some of which is the break material if you dump it all.

 

[Gavin C]

.... A) help clear my wort resulting in less trub in the fermenter ...

Thoughts?

I approach the trub reduction problem in the following way. Some or all of these steps you may already be doing so I apologize if this is all redundant information. I don't have concerns with efficiency, lack of consistency or excessive trub from taking these simple measures.

Reduce/eliminate grain particulate remaining in the boil kettle after lautering

Solution: Use two bags. One inside the other. Seems to work very reliably for me. (I don't have a top quality bag so using two layers seems to make sense)


Reduce hop debris entering the FV

This is not eliminated but is massively reduced by using a hop-spider. I use a plate chiller so this is an important feature of my setup.

Hop-Spider

Remove hot break

The hot break can be skimmed off the top at the onset of the boil

Hot Break and its removal


Cold Break

Owing to the friable nature of cold break, filtering or removal with my setup amounts to a fools errand. I'm not convinced there is any great need to remove it. We've all read the Brulosopher's great experiment on this topic I'm sure.

Cold Break

It all ends up in the FV but compacts down firm at the bottom of the FV. With cold-crashing and gelatin this poses no problems of which I'm aware.

Compacted Trub at Kegging

 

[ol-hazza]

My second to last brew session I chilled, whirlpooled, and let it sit for about ten minutes, drained from a ball valve and tried to filter through a Swiss voile hop bag from wilser. I before I got to the hot/cold break I caught absolutely nothing till the last quart or so of material in the kettle, and filtering then compressing thay between two bowls gained me about a two cups of liquid. I imagine that's about as effective as you'll get aside from doing as I said in the last post and cold crashing before fermentation begins.

I'd say hot/cold break maybe makes up about 5% by volume of post boil. So 5.5 gallons yields about 1 quart of break material. Fermentation produces around 10% trub or so, some of which is the break material if you dump it all.

As I said I'm not worried about trub in the fermenter so why would I cold crash before fermentation.

Also you contradict yourself here by saying you get one quart of break, but earlier saying you got no break material until the last quart and then got 2 cups of liquid out which would suggest break material of half a quart.

Would also help if i knew what the grain bill / gravity was, yeast used and kettle finings as these will all affect the amounts of trub.

10% trub created by fermentation? do you mean 10% of the trub or 10% of the batch size?

 

[ol-hazza]

I approach the trub reduction problem in the following way. Some or all of these steps you may already be doing so I apologize if this is all redundant information. I don't have concerns with efficiency, lack of consistency or excessive trub from taking these simple measures.

Reduce/eliminate grain particulate remaining in the boil kettle after lautering

Solution: Use two bags. One inside the other. Seems to work very reliably for me. (I don't have a top quality bag so using two layers seems to make sense)


Reduce hop debris entering the FV

This is not eliminated but is massively reduced by using a hop-spider. I use a plate chiller so this is an important feature of my setup.

Hop-SpiderView attachment 291165

Remove hot break

The hot break can be skimmed off the top at the onset of the boil

Hot Break and its removalView attachment 291166View attachment 291167View attachment 291168


Cold Break

Owing to the friable nature of cold break, filtering or removal with my setup amounts to a fools errand. I'm not convinced there is any great need to remove it. We've all read the Brulosopher's great experiment on this topic I'm sure.

Cold BreakView attachment 291171

It all ends up in the FV but compacts down firm at the bottom of the FV. With cold-crashing and gelatin this poses no problems of which I'm aware.

Compacted Trub at KeggingView attachment 291170

Thanks Gavin, thats a similar amount of trub to what I'm ending up with my the looks of it.

I could try skimming my wort of hot break at the start, hadn't thought of that regarding this problem.

 

[pricelessbrewing]

As I said I'm not worried about trub in the fermenter so why would I cold crash before fermentation.

Also you contradict yourself here by saying you get one quart of break, but earlier saying you got no break material until the last quart and then got 2 cups of liquid out which would suggest break material of half a quart.

Would also help if i knew what the grain bill / gravity was, yeast used and kettle finings as these will all affect the amounts of trub.

10% trub created by fermentation? do you mean 10% of the trub or 10% of the batch size?

I meant under normal circumstances, I get about 1 qt or so of "kettle loss" that gets left behind in the kettle unless I transfer it all to the fermenter. I only tried to filter the break material out that one time, just because I was curious, it was rather annoying to hold the bag in place under a stream of wort. But yes, I guess if you were concerned, about 2.5% or so of the post boil volume might end up as break material if you completely filtered it out.

10% of batch size is typical for trub left behind from fermentation when packaging, so to get 5 gallons out of the fermenter you'll want to put in about 5.5 gallons. This will vary slightly with how floculent your yeast is, whether you cold crash/gelatin, and whether or not you dumped it all into the fermenter.

 

[ol-hazza]

I meant under normal circumstances, I get about 1 qt or so of "kettle loss" that gets left behind in the kettle unless I transfer it all to the fermenter. I only tried to filter the break material out that one time, just because I was curious, it was rather annoying to hold the bag in place under a stream of wort. But yes, I guess if you were concerned, about 2.5% or so of the post boil volume might end up as break material if you completely filtered it out.

10% of batch size is typical for trub left behind from fermentation when packaging, so to get 5 gallons out of the fermenter you'll want to put in about 5.5 gallons. This will vary slightly with how floculent your yeast is, whether you cold crash/gelatin, and whether or not you dumped it all into the fermenter.

Thanks for clarifying. I also put my wort through a BIAB bag once but it clogged up pretty much straight away and was a nightmare.

I probably average about half a gal loss as well, but of that the majority would be trub that settles out within hours and compacts over a couple of days, and maybe 10% of the total trub, so 1-2% of the total batch size from yeast and krausen dropping etc.

 

[pricelessbrewing]

Thanks for clarifying. I also put my wort through a BIAB bag once but it clogged up pretty much straight away and was a nightmare.

I probably average about half a gal loss as well, but of that the majority would be trub that settles out within hours and compacts over a couple of days, and maybe 10% of the total trub, so 1-2% of the total batch size from yeast and krausen dropping etc.

Interesting, I don't have a clear fermentation vessel so I can't say how the trub layer changes over time throughout fermentation.

 

[Siberian]

Now I know that I can whirlpool to remove it, but it comes back to the kettle size and being limited in how much I can boil, so if I can reduce the amount of gunk/trub/break pre-boil by filtering it while in vorlauf while still getting the same amount of the same gravity wort then my efficiency is increased as I have more useable wort.

A lot of that material at the end of the boil is hot break/proteins. You'll never get that filtered out during the mash. It doesn't form until you boil. I have a very fine bag and recirculate for the entire mash. I can pull reasonably clear samples at the end of the mash. But still have 1/3-1/2 a gallon of trub in my kettle. But it's hot break and hops not grain particles.

If grain bits where making it to the boil in a real quantity you'd have serious astringency problems.

My advice: Get fermcap S, push the kettle to the limit post sparge and boil as big of a batch as you can or treat it a bit like extract and top up in the fermenter.

 

[doug293cz]

I think people should have a good read of what has being said previously in a thread before commenting. For example this was not a thread about dunk sparging. That should be quite clear from title for starters.

Many thread titles aren't very descriptive or don't match the thread starter's post well. So, responding to tread content that doesn't match the title is common around here.

In your OP, you say the following:

My current process is fairly standard, heat 24L (5gal) of strike water, add grist, mash. Heat 8L (2 gal) of sparge water, Pull grains dunk and drain in the wort a couple of times then dunk in sparge water, drain over kettle, repeat 4-5 times.

What you described is in no way a standard sparge process. The fact that it drew responses shouldn't be surprising. Your description may have just been poorly worded, but as written sounds very odd. It's not surprising that the described process drew comments. And, since such comments are were in response to what you wrote, it's not appropriate to say later that they were off topic.

There are two things I wish that I had clarified earlier. Firstly that my worries about Trub in the fermenter were not a problem in itself but rather a symptom of too much gunk in the wort pre boil. Maybe I get the same as everyone else and can't improve this to any degree that is worth it with a vorlauf, maybe I can. I feel like doing the experiment now just to see how much of an effect it has.

A perhaps simpler experiment would be to take about a half liter of wort from your BK prior to the hot break, and then cold crash it in a sealed container. After a few days of cold crashing, measure the amount of grain particulates in the sediment on the bottom of the container. Need to be sure and stir the BK well before taking the sample.

Can I just stress that I'm not worried about having trub in my fermenter.

Again quoting from your OP:

I can just boil 26l without boil over, and then dump it all into my fermenter with a supposed brewhouse efficiency of 80%. However Trub usually accounts for 10-15% of volume into the fermenter so really my efficiency is around 70% which can certainly be improved on.

That statement certainly sounds like you were worried about the amount of trub in the fermenter.

Secondly I was aware that I'm not going to be able to, nor would I want to eliminate hot and cold break.

Some brewers skim the hot break from the top of the BK as it forms using a strainer or similar implement, in order to keep it out of the fermenter. Not much you can do about cold break short of filtering.

Like all good threads though it has bought up a new question that will help answer my other questions.

How much trub do other people get in their fermenters? If you dump your full boil into the fermenter

For instance my current batch has about 4l of trub and yeast and a total batch size of 23L. Been in the fermenter for about 8 days at 20°

@pricelessbrewing uses 10% as the default fermenter trub in his calculator, and that's about what I observe in my fermenters (although I don't actually measure), so your fermenter trub does not seem out of line. You didn't mention cold crashing in your OP. Do you cold crash? If not, then adding that to your process could help compact your fermenter trub and allow you to recover more finished beer from your fermenter.

Brew on

Edit: Wow, lots of responses before I finished putting mine together.

 

[ol-hazza]

A lot of that material at the end of the boil is hot break/proteins. You'll never get that filtered out during the mash. It doesn't form until you boil. I have a very fine bag and recirculate for the entire mash. I can pull reasonably clear samples at the end of the mash. But still have 1/3-1/2 a gallon of trub in my kettle. But it's hot break and hops not grain particles.

If grain bits where making it to the boil in a real quantity you'd have serious astringency problems.

My advice: Get fermcap S, push the kettle to the limit post sparge and boil as big of a batch as you can or treat it a bit like extract and top up in the fermenter.

Nice answer!
Mine would usually be 1/2 - 1 gal depending on the gravity and kettle finings and usually at the higher end of this.
Provided I could recirculate with similar effectiveness you then I might be able to get a 1/3 reduction in trub.

Fermcap s would be a good solution, unfortunately it looks like I cant get it in New Zealand though, I will keep looking but its not in any of my favourite stores.

Would love to know more about your recirculating setup as well, how did it come about, is it mainly for temp control?

 

[ol-hazza]

A perhaps simpler experiment would be to take about a half liter of wort from your BK prior to the hot break, and then cold crash it in a sealed container. After a few days of cold crashing, measure the amount of grain particulates in the sediment on the bottom of the container. Need to be sure and stir the BK well before taking the sample.

I like this, crash it in a measuring cylinder pre boil and pre fermentation and compare. The pre fermentation testing I have been planning on doing to test different amounts and timings for kettle finings.

 

[wobdee]

I approach the trub reduction problem in the following way. Some or all of these steps you may already be doing so I apologize if this is all redundant information. I don't have concerns with efficiency, lack of consistency or excessive trub from taking these simple measures.

Reduce/eliminate grain particulate remaining in the boil kettle after lautering

Solution: Use two bags. One inside the other. Seems to work very reliably for me. (I don't have a top quality bag so using two layers seems to make sense)


Reduce hop debris entering the FV

This is not eliminated but is massively reduced by using a hop-spider. I use a plate chiller so this is an important feature of my setup.

Hop-SpiderView attachment 291165

Remove hot break

The hot break can be skimmed off the top at the onset of the boil

Hot Break and its removalView attachment 291166View attachment 291167View attachment 291168


Cold Break

Owing to the friable nature of cold break, filtering or removal with my setup amounts to a fools errand. I'm not convinced there is any great need to remove it. We've all read the Brulosopher's great experiment on this topic I'm sure.

Cold BreakView attachment 291171

It all ends up in the FV but compacts down firm at the bottom of the FV. With cold-crashing and gelatin this poses no problems of which I'm aware.

Compacted Trub at KeggingView attachment 291170

These are things I do as well. I've also found if i vorlauf about a gallon before pulling my basket it removes some particles. I even run a fine strainer through my kettle prior to hot break, you'd be surprised how much crap you can strain out.

 

[madscientist451]

I Have been BIAB brewing for a while and constantly seeking to improve my brewing or at least tinker with the process and kit.

My 2 cents: You are overthinking all of this. There's no point in reinventing the wheel. Get a 10 gallon cooler and a BIAB bag to fit it. Add a valve/screen to the bottom and mash in that. Just do one or two batch sparges.
The BIAB bag in the cooler means you'll never have a stuck mash, just pull up on the bag slightly if it doesn't drain.
I know a lot of people love BIAB, but I got tired of the mess when I pulled the bag from the brew pot and some other issues.
Good Luck.

 

[wobdee]

Conditioning the grain also helps reduce trub.

 

[bembel]

My 2 cents: You are overthinking all of this. There's no point in reinventing the wheel. Get a 10 gallon cooler and a BIAB bag to fit it. Add a valve/screen to the bottom and mash in that. Just do one or two batch sparges.
The BIAB bag in the cooler means you'll never have a stuck mash, just pull up on the bag slightly if it doesn't drain.
I know a lot of people love BIAB, but I got tired of the mess when I pulled the bag from the brew pot and some other issues.
Good Luck.

plus my 2 cents is almost a nickel
MIAB (BIAB in a 10 gallon cooler is my preferred method two, especially since I do a lot of wheat beers and have had stuck sparges, but no more.)

The insulation of the cooler was a huge plus for mashing ( MIAB )

I am about to add a cheap re-circ pump I pieced together this past weekend and a 'sparge arm' made of loc-lite tubing, and will re-circ the wort from my cooler into my 8 gallon brew kettle through my immersion chiller with the kettle on the stove, filled with water heated to my desired mash temp ( plus 1-2 degrees) and back onto the top of the grain bed for a DIY HERMS set-up, I have read that wort re-circ will bump up my efficiencies so I am psyched to try, up until now Ive been getting high 60s-low 70s, but at 62 cents a pound, im not too concerned, my goal for the set up was to get tighter mash temp controls for multi-step mashes, improved efficiency is a boost.

 

[ol-hazza]

My 2 cents: You are overthinking all of this. There's no point in reinventing the wheel. Get a 10 gallon cooler and a BIAB bag to fit it. Add a valve/screen to the bottom and mash in that. Just do one or two batch sparges.
The BIAB bag in the cooler means you'll never have a stuck mash, just pull up on the bag slightly if it doesn't drain.
I know a lot of people love BIAB, but I got tired of the mess when I pulled the bag from the brew pot and some other issues.
Good Luck.

I dont really see how adding a mash tun to BIAB is any less reinvention than adding a fly spage. Over here the parts for the fly sparge are probably easier to come by that a suitable cooler though.

On the mess front luckily i brew in the garage, but a couple of boil overs have left the floor a mess in pplaces, i really need a bigger kettle

plus my 2 cents is almost a nickel
MIAB (BIAB in a 10 gallon cooler is my preferred method two, especially since I do a lot of wheat beers and have had stuck sparges, but no more.)

The insulation of the cooler was a huge plus for mashing ( MIAB )

I am about to add a cheap re-circ pump I pieced together this past weekend and a 'sparge arm' made of loc-lite tubing, and will re-circ the wort from my cooler into my 8 gallon brew kettle through my immersion chiller with the kettle on the stove, filled with water heated to my desired mash temp ( plus 1-2 degrees) and back onto the top of the grain bed for a DIY HERMS set-up, I have read that wort re-circ will bump up my efficiencies so I am psyched to try, up until now Ive been getting high 60s-low 70s, but at 62 cents a pound, im not too concerned, my goal for the set up was to get tighter mash temp controls for multi-step mashes, improved efficiency is a boost.

Im the same on the cost front, its more the challenge that motivates the design "improvements".

Im pretty keen to follow your experiences with a recirc system, would be cool if you could keep me updated

 

[Ozarks Mountain Brewery]

I just throw my hops directly into the pot and I use a crush whilrfoc Tablet so for best results in my set up in trub and hops filtration I set my carboy in a freezer for 12 hours after the boil and all trub and hops drop to the bottom, I pull the clear beer of the top to ferment. I do lose about a quart or 2 but I start with 7.5 gallons to allow for all the losses in my pot and cold crashing, this has worked for me for the last 2 years

 

[bembel]

I just throw my hops directly into the pot and I use a crush whilrfoc Tablet so for best results in my set up in trub and hops filtration I set my carboy in a freezer for 12 hours after the boil and all trub and hops drop to the bottom, I pull the clear beer of the top to ferment. I do lose about a quart or 2 but I start with 7.5 gallons to allow for all the losses in my pot and cold crashing, this has worked for me for the last 2 years

I have been doing the same thing, after one night I was exhausted from mashing and too tired to boil, I just poured the warm wort into a clean bucket with sealing lid and stuck it in the fridge to wait until morning, the lid self seals due to the cooling wort and you keep a sterile wort as long as your bucket is clean. ( would not wait 2-3 days, but 12 hours is fine )

Two 'fall-off' benefits from being lazy

#1, your wort is now 45-50 degrees without having to use ice water through a CFC or other heat exchange to get it below 60, so you can pitch at 55 and raise slowly to fermenting temp

#2 ALL THE CRAP ( hot break, cold break, grain break, coffee break, you name it,) IS DENSE SLUDGE ON THE BOTTOM OF THE BUCKET NOW and you can just pour your wort into your fermentor and stop when it gets down to the sludge, then pour that last bit into a filter if you care too, this saves a lot of time and aggravation in my world. US Plastics sells nifty 100, 200 and 400 micron filters that fit right onto the top of a standard bucket, I use a 200 and a 400 and pour the last bit into this while I mess with my aeration stone and yeast, by the time im dont, gravity has cleared another 2-3 qts for me and the sludge goes down the drain

http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/item.aspx?itemid=24071&catid=685

 

[wobdee]

Nice, I've been thinking of something similar for my lagers since its hard to cool them down below 50° before pitching. Might as well leave it in my fermenting fridge overnight, syphon off the trub and pitch the yeast.

 

[Siberian]

Nice answer!
Would love to know more about your recirculating setup as well, how did it come about, is it mainly for temp control?

It came about mainly as a temp control of the mash that let me set it and forget it. First I was running into issues heating the mash with my induction setup and having the bottom get hot and the top of the mash stay too cool.

So, I started just recirculating with a small pump and a temp probe in line, that helped.... but then it was just too much effort to keep adjusting the heat so I bought a RIMs tube and automated it with a home built controller based on this design - http://www.aledrinkers.com/

All in all it was a steady evolution from what I originally wanted as a setup (induction BIAB nothing special) into this setup with a BrewHardware.com RIMs tube, a 240v element setup to run low density on 120v instead, tiny 12v pump, extra ball valve, some hoses...

Evolved slowly over a year, I don't regret a bit of the change. Now I'm always recirculating, but I can walk away for an hour (or 2 if I get distracted) and come back to the mash exactly where I wanted it still.

FYI, the stainless steel bowl on the right hand side with the handle is my 'boil lid', my induction plate has trouble bringing 10+ gallons to a hard rolling boil, that lid takes care of it and gives me a good amount of predictable boil off (1g/hr).

 

[ol-hazza]

The more I hear about RIMS the more I want to upgrade.

Unfortunately I blew my car up and have had to buy a new one so there goes any significant upgrades to my brewery for now.