small sparge volume in an aio

[fluketamer]

hi when i did brew in a bag i usually sparged with 2 qts of 170 deg water per pound of grain. when i see alot of vids online of people using electric aio's i see them sparging with small amounts of water like 1-2 gallons. brewers friend recommended 3 gallons of sparge water for 11 pounds of grain in a 6 gallon batch. then i saw a post about someone saying they dont sparge at all with an aio they just put all the water in the kettle at the beginning . i am about to use my aio for the first time. please help with my sparge volume. thanks

 

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Off the top, if you have recipes already from BIAB, or a process you liked, you can basically keep it.

There's no correct or wrong way to do it, and the AIO doesn't change it.

I've slowly converted from sparge to no sparge. My efficiencies dropped 5 - 10% but I am now doing the "buy a little extra grain" thing to make up for it.

One consideration is that AIO's with baskets have "dead space" around the sides and under that basket. So... 1) every 15 minutes or so, lift the basket and slowly lower it to get that stuff mixed in, and feel free to stir the grain. 2) Also keep in mind that water in that dead space will not be touching the grain, and so any grain in the basket might end up a little on the dry side / oatmeal like.

You might consider moving to no-sparge if it doesn't screw up everything for you, for the process you are used to.

 

[huckdavidson]

Coming from batch sparging I still split my water 50/50 or 60/40 mash/sparge when using my G40.

Only certain styles of AIO baskets suffer from the dead space problem. The G40 has columns of holes in the basket up the sides that prevent that dead space problem.

http://bayareamashers.org/maindocs/BatchSparging.htm

 

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Only certain styles of AIO baskets suffer from the dead space problem. The G40 has columns of holes in the basket up the sides that prevent that dead space problem.

Yes and no - the Anvil's basket has holes galore as well, but the water doesn't really flow there unless you help it out a bit. Recirculation tends to pull it through the center and in a loop. Sure some of the sides mix in but not much on their own.

Also regarding the dead space, without recirculation that water is not mixed in with the grain at any given moment. And even then it only sort of is, you can have oatmeal in the basket and water around it, not a more "normal" type of thing. So if you shoot for a 1.33 or whatever ratio, it's sort of there but not there at the same time.

I'm just saying it's stuff to consider.

 

[huckdavidson]

Yes and no - the Anvil's basket has holes galore as well, but the water doesn't really flow there unless you help it out a bit. Recirculation tends to pull it through the center and in a loop. Sure some of the sides mix in but not much on their own.

I'm not sure that changes my response. The G40 has recirculation and columns of holes all the way up the side of the basket vs. the Anvil basket with only holes at the bottom, which if the mash is high enough can restrict the flow to only the liquid going through the mash vs. also including some of the liquid on top of the mash.

 

[doug293cz]

I'm not sure that changes my response. The G40 has recirculation and columns of holes all the way up the side of the basket vs. the Anvil basket with only holes at the bottom, which if the mash is high enough can restrict the flow to only the liquid going through the mash vs. also including some of the liquid on top of the mash.

If you want to see just how well the wort between the basket and kettle wall does or doesn't get homogenized with the wort in the basket, do a test mash with all pilsner malt, and add a few drops of a dark food coloring on top of the grain in the center of the basket. Then at the end of the recirculated mash, compare the color intensity of a wort sample taken between the basket and vessel wall near the top, and wort dawn off from under the basket. Figure out how much food coloring to use by dying a similar volume of plain water, and see how much coloring is required to get a deep color.

If you want to get even more sophisticated, take wort samples from different depths in the space between the basket and vessel wall.

Brew on

 

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Or make gravity readings! At the various locations. Use a turkey baster, pipette, or whatever you measure ml of acid additions if you do that. I guess I do, and don't have a turkey baster, haha. Hopefully we all have refractometers. If not, it's a good excuse to get one, they are very handy tools. As a bonus you can do this on a beer actually being brewed. Without turning it blue or green or whatever anyhow.

 

[hottpeper13]

After reading this ,I love my simple system. Mash in BIAB for 60-90 min ,stirring every 15 min, 80% eff.

 

[Bobby_M]

I don't sparge. It's not worth it.

 

[fluketamer]

I don't sparge. It's not worth it.

i like this responce . i watch a lot of basic brewing radio videos on youtube and notice they almost never sparge. steve usually just says after boiling for x minutes i collected my wort. i also notice him sometimes using up to 12 lbs of malt for 5-6 ish beers. so my last pilsner i used i think 10 lbs of malt to make 6.5 gallons of beer . i ended up sparging almost 3 gallons of water to get to 7.5 preboil volume. am i correct in assuming if i just started with 11 or 12 lbs of malt i could get similar SG and then just throw out the unsparged grains that still have a lot of sweet runnings. is that the idea of no sparge.

 

[Bobby_M]

i like this responce . i watch a lot of basic brewing radio videos on youtube and notice they almost never sparge. steve usually just says after boiling for x minutes i collected my wort. i also notice him sometimes using up to 12 lbs of malt for 5-6 ish beers. so my last pilsner i used i think 10 lbs of malt to make 6.5 gallons of beer . i ended up sparging almost 3 gallons of water to get to 7.5 preboil volume. am i correct in assuming if i just started with 11 or 12 lbs of malt i could get similar SG and then just throw out the unsparged grains that still have a lot of sweet runnings. is that the idea of no sparge.

Sparging's primary purpose is to increase mash/lauter efficiency. It reliably does that, especially in systems that are designed for it, but it's not without cons. For one, it does somewhat complicate water adjustment calculations (if you do that). Second, if you're not caring for your mash pH or know what your water has in it for that matter, sparging always makes mash pH worse if your water is alkaline. Long story short, everything being equal, you have a much better chance of making good wort without sparging.

The other practical reason for sparging is if the mash tun is too small to handle all the grain and all the water for a no sparge process. In that case, you have no choice. I just brewed a 12% stout and was pushing the normal batch size my kettle is made for and I had to do a 1 gallon sparge. Rare, but it happens.

Other than the obvious advantage of simplicity with a full volume mash, the one thing that I really like about it is that water calculations are one and done and when I'm testing the mash liquor's gravity over the course of the mash, that gravity matches the preboil gravity so I know exactly when I'm about to hit my numbers.

 

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Certainly agreed.

For my 2.5-3 gallon brews in my Anvil 6.5, I stopped sparging. There was usually so little grain (6 lbs or so) that I could squeeze the bejeezers out of it by hand and sparging had very little left to take care of for me.

For a 5 gallon Imperial in my 10.5 kettle, I definitely sparged. No way I could squeeze 22lbs of grain with any great result. I let it drain a bit, squeeze a little, and then move it over to an old SS pot and let it sit in a couple gallons of water while the rest of the wort heads towards boiling temps. I repeat the drain and squeeze and move all that accumulated liquid to the main kettle. I do have to boil a lot longer, but of course I can get a higher gravity by doing all the extra work.

So maybe "it depends" on your volume. It's how I see it. For small volumes there's no way I'd sparge any more.

Just repeating what was already said I guess.

 

[micraftbeer]

I still sparge. After so much effort spent over the years understanding my mash efficiency through various experiments, it's hard to be satisfied with 70% mash efficiently. Personal preference, obviously.

But when I change around systems, I just have the equipment profile in Brewfather, and I target 1.25 qt/lb mash thickness (again, personal preference). The equipment profile setup right with recoverable and non recoverable volumes just spits out how much water I put in the mash, and how much in my sparge water heater.

 

[jmstone617]

I’ve experimented with sparge and no-sparge on my Gen4 BrewZilla. The no-sparge was definitely simpler, but my efficiency was abysmal. I’m sure with more experimentation I could bring it up, but the obvious balance to the lower efficiency is more grain, and for a lot of the stuff I’m doing for a 5 gallon batch in the 35L unit, I don’t have A TON of additional space in the malt pipe. Brewfather calculates my water additions for both the strike water and sparge water, so that’s not a huge deal. Yes, I have to heat up the sparge water separately but I could choose not to and just sparge with whatever I can get out of my faucet. The 220V system heats pretty quick. YMMV.

 

[fluketamer]

im very new at this but last time i just heated the sparge water in the aio then first ran it off to a 3 gallon pot which i kept in my preheated oven. after the mash the water in the oven was still to my surprise perfect 170 degrees for sparge.
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[hiphoppotamuss]

im very new at this but last time i just heated the sparge water in the aio then first ran it off to a 3 gallon pot which i kept in my preheated oven. after the mash the water in the oven was still to my surprise perfect 170 degrees for sparge.
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This! !