High OG low efficiency. Compensate with more sparge water and loger boil?

[Smellyglove]

Since high OG beers uses less sparge water, can I just adjust my boiltime until I reach a sparge water volume which I "feel" is enough to rinse all the good stuff from the grains?

If I monitor the Ph and gravity of the runnings, is this the way to do it?

Sorry doublepost.

 

[billl]

The easiest way to do it is just up the grain bill a bit and live with the slightly lower efficiency. You can add more water and boil longer, but long boils do have impacts on flavor.

 

[bobeer]

you can also add some lme/dme too to make up some gravity points. I've never done it but I know it's a pretty common practice.
I would also make sure you're getting the IBU's you want with a longer boil too.

 

[Smellyglove]

Yeah. But I want to make it all grain all the way. And I want to do a marathon boil since I haven't done that before.

But, can anyone tell me if I'm way outside the ballpark if I add enough extra sparge water so the ratio between sparge and mash water is what I normally use when hitting my gravities?

 

[billl]

You didn't post any numbers, so nobody can tell you if you are in the right ballpark. If you do AG, you should know your boiloff rate and should be able to tell how much longer you would need to boil to get down to your desired volumes. eg 1 gallon/hr adds and extra hour for each gallon of extra sparge you use.

 

[Qhrumphf]

The longer boil will darken the wort and add some flavor. That may or may not be what you want. Another possibility is to do it partigyle style, since you can easily obtain a very high gravity first runnings, and boil down to something very high. Or if you don't want very high gravity, you could then top off the first runnings with a little water to finish where you want. And then you could make a small beer out the sparge runnings.

http://braukaiser.com/download/batch_sparge_simulator.xls