singybrue
Well-Known Member
Another thing to check is the accuracy of your thermometer. If that's off, it can affect your beer.
Biscuits,
A bit more about sparging and boil.
I sparge with 1.5 gallons of water at 170 F.
I sparge four times going from kettle to bucket, back and forth.
There is some spillage each time so that accounts for a small amount of lost wort.
I boil for one hour and that generally reduces the wort from 1.5 gallons down to one gallon.
Maybe a bigger kettle would help?
Biscuits,
Thanks.
To confirm:
two pounds of pale maris otter plus a few specialty grains
specialty grains:
63g of caramel/crystal 10 Breiss
14g of Munich dark 30L Gambrinus
63g of Munich 10L Gambrinus
A bit more about sparging and boil.
I sparge with 1.5 gallons of water at 170 F.
I sparge four times going from kettle to bucket, back and forth.
There is some spillage each time so that accounts for a small amount of lost wort.
I boil for one hour and that generally reduces the wort from 1.5 gallons down to one gallon.
Maybe a bigger kettle would help?
More questions from me! What do you mean by "sparge four times going from kettle bo bucket, back and forth" It sounds like you mean you're pouring wort back and forth.
When you sparge, you want to use water (only clear water), to "rinse" the sugars from the grains. You want to NEVER pour the wort over the grains, except to strain the first little bit (called vorlaufing). Running wort back through the grains, instead of sparge water, would definitely reduce the efficiency. Or am I misunderstanding what you are saying?
It's easiest if you put your grains in a strainer above the pot and just pour the water thoroughly over them until you reach your boil volume.
Thinking of a washing machine. If you just rinsed the clothes with the same water you used in the wash, it would not get all of the soap out. In the same way, that's like mashing, lautering, and sparging. You mash to get the grains and water all mixed up, using 1.5 (ish) quarts of water per pound of grain. Stir the heck out of it, like your washing machine agitates the clothes. After the mash, you can drain that wort and put it in the pot. Then, either add your sparge water to the grains and stir it up again like it owes you money and drain that, OR put the grains in the strainer over the pot and pour clear water over that. Either way is ok.
But 'rinsing' with wort means that those sticky sugars will stick back to the grain and not come out, since the whole principle here is diffusion. You want to rinse your grains (sparge) only with water.
on an interesting note, there is a fairly recent brew strong episode where John Blichman guests and talks about multiple mashes. The idea was how big of a beer one could make using a Brew Easy I believe. It sounded as though mashes could be additive meaning that doing one mash and then using the runoff from that mash as the "strike water" in another mash will essentially double the gravity. Obviously, this is not the sparging you are talking about here, but it reminded me of it and it totally blew my mind so I had to share.
What do you mean that you lose some liquid during sparging?
How much water do you start with, and how much wort do you end up with? The grain should absorb about .125 gallons/pound of grain, so probably about 1/2 a gallon, but you won't lose any liquid during the sparge since the grain is saturated.
For your technique, do you use 1-2 quarts of water per pound of grain in the mash? And then pour hot water over that for the sparge? Or something else?
So, what I'm hearing on this forum is that Christenen's book is giving bad advice.
Thanks to all who have offered advice on sparging. I want to share the instructions from the Brew Better Beer book.
"Pour the mashed grains into the strainer. The wort collects in the bucket beneath. Slowly pour the warmed sparge water over the grains, rinsing them evenly, until you have collected 1.5 gallons of wort. Transfer the strainer with the used grains to the kettle. Slowly pour the wort over the grains again. Repeat this step twice more, ending with the wort back in your kettle."
So, what I'm hearing on this forum is that Christenen's book is giving bad advice.
reartn, thanks for following up.
I had two previous batches but my first was using extract and the second, my first all grain, I did all kinds of things wrong but I did get good fermentation.
Thanks to the forum I've learned a number of things to improve my brewing and my ABV calculations.
I bought a mash tun that I will use with a single sparging as opposed to the wort recycling I had been doing.
I will up the OG by adding more grain to the 5-gallon recipes that I adapt for one gallon batches.
I will stop mis-using my refractometer and return to using a hydrometer.
Those are the main things. Let's see how the next batch turns out.
Chickypad, I'm sorry but it looks increasingly like my problems relate to mis-use of the refractometer. What I thought was 1.080/1.060 when I enter in the brewersfriend Brix calculator comes out as 1.037/1.011... so another case of inadequate OG.
Enter your email address to join: