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.
.... A) help clear my wort resulting in less trub in the fermenter ...
Thoughts?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.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.
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.
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.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.
Can I just stress that I'm not worried about having trub in my fermenter.
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.
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.Secondly I was aware that I'm not going to be able to, nor would I want to eliminate hot and cold break.
@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.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°
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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
Nice answer!
Would love to know more about your recirculating setup as well, how did it come about, is it mainly for temp control?
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