First All-Grain Recipe ?'s

[htm6934]

This past weekend I brewed my first all-grain batch. The recipe was called "St. James Dry Stout". Everything went pretty smoothly with the exception of a few things. I believe I mashed and sparged a bit too hot as I didn't realize how well my new mashtun(igloo 10 gallon) and HLT(5 gallon rubbermaid) were going to hold their temps. Aside from that I ran an iodine test, stayed red/amber, and boiled for an hour.

This recipe called for 1.33 qts/lb for 8 lbs of grain. That comes out to 2.66 gallons of water unless I did my math wrong. So I needed a boil volume of 6.5 gallons to account for the evaporation during the boil. My question is, do I just need to sparge in that much extra water to reach my boil volume of 6.5?

What ended up happening is I added 4 gallons to my HLT in hopes that would account for the difference but when i sparged, I still came up a gallon short and had to add a gallon of water directly to my boil. Any thought's on this? Thanks.

Also, I always do a secondary but I was thinking about keeping in the primary this time just to avoid sanitary issues.

 

[feinbera]

Generally you can just keep sparging until you hit your desired pre-boil volume. Since the grain has already absorbed just about all the water it's going to during the mash, you can measure your first runnings and sparge with enough water to make up the difference (I usually use about 10% extra, just in case).

This isn't always true -- if you've got a very light grain bill, you can "oversparge" -- so, measure the gravity of your sparge runnings. If they're above 1.010, you're well away from the "danger zone".

 

[htm6934]

Thanks for the quick reply.
What does oversparge mean to the beer and how will that negatively effect it?