First partial mash

[Morganrich2]

I brewed a partial mash out of Zymurgy, Cream Swill, and i have a question about my technique. The recipe call to mash in a bag at 150 for an hour then sparge with 2.5 qt at 175 by putting the grain bag in a colander and pouring the sparge water over it. Since i was planning on a full boil i calculated how much additional water I would need after the mash water and sparge water. This was about 2.5 gallons, so i put it in my boil kettle and heated it to sparge temp, then i put in my grain bag and dunked it up and down like a giant tea bag. After this I put it in the colander and sparged as directed. Is it possible to over sparge? Is this sort of "double sparging" a bad idea? Thanks a lot.

Morgan

 

[pkeeler]

You can oversparge. When the runnings get into the 1.010 or below range, you can get some astringent character. Above 170, you can also leach out astringent tannins. Now, I'm not sure how much grain you dunked. Might not be enough to make a big impact. How does the beer taste?

 

[Morganrich2]

It is still in the fermenter, so i'm not sure how it has turned out yet. Just was not sure if dunking the grain on top of sparging it would have any adverse affects. Or any positive effects. Can you under sparge? What is sparging really doing? It was only 1.5 pounds of grain.

 

[erikpete18]

Sparging is basically just rinsing some more sugar out of the grains. As you do your mash, your enzymes convert a bunch of your complex sugars into simpler sugars (maltose, etc.). Some of those get left behind when you pull your grains out the first time, so they need to be rinsed. It sounds like you kind of did a hybrid batch sparge (the first dunking) and then fly sparge (running water through the grains in the colander).

More than likely, your beer is fine (isn't it always anyways ). You probably didn't get down to 1.010 with your rinse since it was probably flowing pretty quickly through your grains. What I normally do is remove my bag from the pot I mashed in and then move to a second pot with hot water (~170-175) like you did. The I stir the grain around good and let it sit for 15 min. Then I pull out the bag, dump the sparged water into my boil kettle, and then just toss the grain bag into a colander to drip out, but don't bother rinsing at that point.

One way to find out if you oversparged is take a look at your efficiency. Any idea what yours was? If it was higher than 85-90% you might have oversparged, but a lot of people can get efficiencies that high without any problem, so YMMV.