Do specialty grains get sparged?

[rcreveli]

Doing my second brew tomorrow and Irish red. After steeping my grains and scooping them out do I need to do a sparge process and can someone please explain sparging I'm still a little unclear.

This is a partial boil malt extract.

 

[eljefe]

Doing my second brew tomorrow and Irish red. After steeping my grains and scooping them out do I need to do a sparge process and can someone please explain sparging I'm still a little unclear.

This is a partial boil malt extract.

Did you get a kit? Kits usually have a grain bag in the kit that is used for the specialty grains. You would soak the grains in the water (make sure it is not above 170). Hopefully you have a bag, you just pull the bag out after the designated time 20 - 30 minutes and start to heat the water up. There is no need to sparge the specialty grains. In most case, the specialty grains are only adding flavor not fermentable sugar. If your kit didn't come with a bag, you can proably search this site for alternatives.

 

[rcreveli]

I just wanted to be sure about the steeping process. This is not a kit but I do have a grain bag.

 

[eljefe]

The easiest thing to do is throw the grains in the bag, steep them like a tea bag, remove the grains after a set time, and start to heat up the water to begin the boil.

Key things to remember - do not squeeze the bag to get everything out of it, and do not boil the water with the specialty grains still in the pot.

 

[Fingers]

When I did extracts, I would ladle the water over the grains when I took the bag out. You could also keep a little hot, clean water to the side to drizzle over it. Since the grains are in a bag they may tend to hold their grainy goodness inside for a bit. Just don't squeeze the grain bag to wring it out. You'll get some tannins from the husks coming out.

 

[PT Ray]

My thoughts are no for your steeping grains. Malts/grain like your crystals and darker roasted don't need to be mashed so can be steeped in a liberal amount of a water.

If you're doing a mini mash with your base malts and/or darker kilned malts like Munich you would start a little more conservative with the water to keep from diluting your enzymes for better conversion. Once you have your conversion than you can rinse/sparge the grains.

I guess you could say you use your water up front when steeping and most of it on the back half with mashing.

 

[Hep]

I rinse mine. The reason I do so is that I steep in a relatively small volume of water (1 gal) and I usually stir in 1 lb of extract and a tsp of 5.2 pH stabilizer before steeping. Probably overkill, but the small volume, extract, and stabilizer maintains a 5.2 ish pH for steeping to ensure no tannin extraction. I rinse the grains with the water to make up my boil volume to ensure I get all of the extract/steeping grain goodness out