help with water volume for todays brew

[bucfanmike]

Ive done many all grain gits from midwest and the beers I do are usually about 9 lbs of grain and using the 1.25 qt/lb and .5 gal/lb sparge usually yields my preboil of 6.5 gallons. This works out well as I end with 5 gals in the bucket.

Now today i am doing a happy holiday ale and its 14lbs of grain which comes out to 4.375 gallons mash, 7 gallons sparge. From searching the site I expect to lose around 3 gallons to absorption, still leaves me over 8 gallons pre boil. This still calls for a 60 min boil. Do these volumes sound right? This will go in a 6.5 gallon bucket for fermentation so if I overshoot 5 gallons by a bit its ok, but I dont want the SG to suffer either. Kit says SG should be 1.062-1.066. I'm thinking since I batch sparge I could adjust sparge volume after I see how much runoff I get from mash, but as I dont yet have a sight glass on my HLT keggle its kind of a pain unless I wait to heat my water at the last moment.

Mike

 

[maida7]

Do yourself a favor and try beersmith. They offer a 2 week trail use. With a little setup it will work out all the numbers for you. If you like you can then buy it.

But to answer your question: you should cut back on the sparge water or it will water down the wort. You should only sparge enough to get your target pre-boil volume. Do not base the sparge water on the amount of grain.

so if you think 7 gallons of sparge water will get you 8 gallons of wort and you really want 6.5 gallons of wort, cut the sparge water back to 5.5 gallons.