Get the hull out?

[BrewMU]

An article in the last BYO recommended no-sparge brewing as a way to purposefully lower efficiency in order to extract fewer tannins from the grain hulls.
Is there any reason why a person couldn't sieve some or all of the hulls out of the grain, replace them with rice hulls for lauter flow, than just sparge the bejeezus out it and boil down as necessary?

 

[daksin]

The biggest reason I can think of is that if your process is mostly correct, tannin extraction shouldn't be an issue anyway. This process would be a lot of work to fix something that shouldn't need fixing, or could be more easily corrected with some process or water adjustments. What situations would this useful for?

 

[yorkbrew]

I don't think the efficiency gain would be worth the trouble. Plus you might affect the flavor of the final product by altering the standard procedure that much.

I think BYO was trying to justify lower efficiency more that anything else.

 

[JuanMoore]

I didn't read the article, but I'm guessing they were simply listing lower risk of tannin extraction as a benefit of no-sparge brewing, not as a solution to tannin issues.

As far as your plan, there are a whole host of reasons it wouldn't work, including the fact that rice hulls have similar tannin content to barley husks. Tannin extraction is primarily a function of PH and temperature, both of which are very easy to deal with compared to the husk separation process you're suggesting. The husks play a much smaller role, but the husk particles that contribute the most to tannin extraction are the small shredded pieces that would be difficult/nearly impossible to separate from the crushed kernels. If you want to keep the husks from being shredded during milling and reduce the associated risk, look into malt conditioning.