leftover sparge water

[iron_city_ap]

I'm making the transition to all grain and have only done it once so far. In about a week or so I'm going to be brewing up another batch. The last time I did it, my kettle filled up and I had some extra sparge water. If this happens again the next time, what should I do with it? Should I just let it cool and add it to the fermenter, or wait until the batch boils down some then add it? I don't know if this is common or not. I really need to just bite the bullet and get a big enough kettle to do full boils, but in the mean time, how should I plan on handling it? I would say there was maybe 1/2 to a gallon of liquid. Not a huge amount, but enough that I think it is pretty significant.

 

[mightynintendo]

When you say "sparge water", are you referring to your sparge runnings?

 

[iron_city_ap]

Yeah. Sorry about that. I'm still waiting for my coffee to kick in.

 

[bja]

wait until the batch boils down some then add it.

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

There are two schools of thought on fly sparge and runnings.

The one school calculates sparge water needs and cuts off the sparge when that volume has been depleted and drains the mash as dry as it can be done reasonably. Then, they check the pre-boil gravity, calculate boil-off and post boil gravity to determine how long to boil for.

The other school continuously adds sparge water until either the kettle volume is reached or the running gravity drops below 1.010 to 1.008 (pH dependant). Thus, the mash always stays wet and any residual wort in taht mash is discarded regardless of efficiency. Some may decide to do a second runnings type beer if the running are still sweet and kettle volume is met.

The rest is the same either way. check pre-boil, cal boil-off and final grav to target.

Anything left in the liquor tank gets used for cleaning.

 

[mightynintendo]

I hear you on that one. I'm nursing my second cup right now. By simply leaving out 1/2 to 1 gallon of sparge runnings, your beer will be a little higher in gravity and lower in volume but the integrity of your sugar profile will not be compromised. If you want to use all your sparge runnings, I would suggest extending your boil to allow for a full boil of your last addition. You might try to have a very vigorous boil for the first 30 minutes, then add the remaining sparge runnings and employ a 60 to 90 minute boil afterwards.

Of course, you really should get a larger kettle as soon as possible.

 

[iron_city_ap]

Cool. Thanks guys. I'm still a little confused with some of the stuff, but I'm trying to learn it. I would think that by leaving out the last bit of sparge runnings, I would end up ultimately with a lower gravity beer since I'm leaving out a fair amount of fermentables and adding top off water to get up to 5gals.

Plus naturally, adding the sparge runnings will take the wort of the the boil, then take a little time to get going again. Wouldn't that then change the hop profile, etc.... or is that being a little too finnicky?

Too many questions.... (to self)..."stay on topic... stay on topic..."

 

[mightynintendo]

Well you probably wouldn't want to add any hops until after you added the last bit of sparge runnings. Sorry, I didn't realize you were adding water at the end of your boil. I figured you were boiling the full volume. In your circumstance, your OG will indeed be lower. If you were doing full boils and left some sparge runnings behind, your OG would be higher because of the less volume and the diluting nature of sparge runnings. Consider your mash runnings; the gravity there is considerably higher than your sparge runnings. When adding the sparge runnings to the mash runnings, you are diluting the gravity in a way that can be visualized by the positive side of the equation y=e^(1/x), where the y-axis is the gravity and the x-axis is sparge running additions.