Vacuum pump for sparge?

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Since it says do not use with alcohol I'm going with no here bro.

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it'd just be sugar water. but maybe just maybe....i was thinking ....if i had a sealed container with two holes, one for the mash tun, and the other for the vacuum....i could suck out the very last bit of sugar from the mash? there's a lot of residule sugar left over in there....

i had the idea, because i had a stuck sparge with victory and white flour, few batches back.....and i have a handheld pump for brakes and stuff. (well that didn't work, "don't do that") realized i'd have to do a LOT of hand work out, to actually get a 10 gallon container to pull a vac with it, so that the wort didn't f up my hand held one and have to buy a new one :(...


anyway got to thinking, about maybe a cheap electric one, and seeing if it'd get me better effec.....for $60 i might try it out for the hell of it.....might even shorten brew day....15 minute sparge with 88-90% BH effec, according to what beersmith2 says....
 
An HVAC vacuum pump will develop a vacuum in your sparge vessel if you mange to seal it up tight, but will not necessarily remove the residual wort. This type of pump works to remove air, contaminants and moisture from refrigeration loop by creating vacuum so liquid contaminants go to vapor form despite not being heated, boiled off by reducing pressure.

If it has any chance of working, you would have to have an intermediate chamber to pull liquid into, also vacuum sealed. Sounds like kind of a pain, and I suspect it would not work. In any case am not going to try w my HVAC pump, it cost a fair bit. And by the way, you are supposed to change the oil in pump after pulling contaminants though it.

Some other kind of vacuum pump might work better, like a used dentistry one (yuck) or one designed for other liquid use.

Hey, it occurs to me you might have better luck by introducing compressed air into top of sparge vessel.
 
i was looking at the kind for chemistry that you use for buchner funnels and distilling things.....price jumped to damn near $1000....maybe not a weekend party after all....
 
Still not really getting where the vacuum helps, but fwiw, I'm pretty sure I've seen single-digit barrel brew vessels that imploded (or at least, heavily collapsed) due to vacuum pressure used unwisely...

Cheers!
 
I wouldn't use vacuum, but rather air pressure. You'd need to put a flexible membrane on top of the grain bed, and then put an airtight cover on the mash tun. The membrane needs to be sealed so that air cannot leak around it into the grain bed. You would need a pressure rated mash tun for this. If your mash tun had a diameter of 15", then the surface area of the grain bed would be ~177 sq in. At 10 psi air pressure, you would be squeezing on the grain bed with 1770 lb!

This would be a poor man's filter press.

Brew on :mug:
 
Take the grain out and build a cake and press it in your cider press, re bulk sparge and repeat, efficiency would go through the roof.
 
i once tried a bit back to put a bucket lid that fits pretty good in my 10 gallon round cooler with weights on it, didn't help...

and the nay sayers are probably right...i think the slow disolution(word?) of sugar in water the fresh water when fly sparging probably pushes what's there out pretty good.....


i still want an electric vacuum pump, though.....so i might revive this with a try still....
 
You could theoretically use said vacuum pump if you're really dead-set on it to do a variation of Doug's suggestion, placing some sort of membrane or mostly occlusive press type object top on the grainbed, and use the vacuum pump to draw on the grains, thus using atmospheric pressure to push on them...

But really, it's probably not a good idea, for the reasons mentioned above and the generally accepted notion that it's bad practice to squeeze grains (think vorlaufing, not squeezing grain bags, etc).

Now... could you maybe extract a little more wort and change the impacts normally associated with over-sparging, like raising pH? I suppose if you really want to play with a new toy, minding food safety concerns, the impacts probably won't be that disastrous.

Happy brewing!

:mug:
 
I would be worried that I would only get more sugar and not much more malt taste, and that all that effort could be replaced by a cup of white sugar.

May I suggest to do like Budweiser do, and use rice as starch for your extra diastatic power?
 
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10_degrees_play-doh said:
...

But really, it's probably not a good idea, for the reasons mentioned above and the generally accepted notion that it's bad practice to squeeze grains (think vorlaufing, not squeezing grain bags, etc).

...
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It is no longer generally accepted that squeezing the grains is bad practice. Commercial breweries (Alaska is one) use filter presses to squeeze more wort out of the grains, and there are equipment suppliers that specifically market filter presses to the brewing industry.

Brew on :mug:
 
Dland said:
Desides brac, think of all the stuff you could do w air compressor.
Click to expand...

damn it! now you got me thinking of my 12v car pump, and just ducting it to the and having pump air out the lid! lol :mug:

Barbarossa said:
May I suggest to do like Budweiser do, and use rice as starch for your extra diastatic power?
Click to expand...

i'm still thinking sucking is better then blowing ;)...but i don't think rice adds diastatic power....

and as far as my vacuum idea, when i'm using a vacuum on a buchner funnel it holds negative pressure as long as there is still liquid to be sucked out....kinda my thought...

i want to quote the pic of gas diffusion, with the cylinders, and say that's wasted effec points in the middle! if the cyclinders had an active vacuum at the bottom one, it'd be like way clearer!
 
Put some grain post mash in a champagne bottle and then use a vacu vin to suck the bottle ( upside down ) or some vacuum sealers have a bottle vac attach.
Then you could see whether you will get any extraction.

Have a slight concern that you make a sealed system with hot grains in and then put vacuum on it and you will lower the partial pressure enough to lower the boiling point of the water. Then you extract water and still leave the sugars behind.

They have squashed grapes for many years and not moved to vacuum extraction.
 
bracconiere said:
...

i'm still thinking sucking is better then blowing ;)...but i don't think rice adds diastatic power....

and as far as my vacuum idea, when i'm using a vacuum on a buchner funnel it holds negative pressure as long as there is still liquid to be sucked out....kinda my thought...

...
Click to expand...
Sucking, blowing - it's all about the pressure differential. With sucking the max pressure differential you can get is 14.7 psi. But you can't even get that as the water will boil before you get that much of a differential. With pressure, you can get as much differential as your vessel will withstand.

A buchner funnel is used to get flow thru a medium which severely restricts flow, by means of a vacuum created pressure differential. As you said you need to maintain a liquid seal above the material of interest. In a normal grain bed, we don't have the flow restriction, and the sparge water will flow thru the grain bed by itself.

You could get very close to 100% lauter efficiency with a fly spare if you wanted to use a whole lot of sparge water, but then you would have to boil off the excess water. The other problem is that when the wort concentration gets very low, the osmotic pressure that wants to extract tannins, silicates, and undesirable components from the spent grain gets higher. This is a different effect than high sparge pH causing extraction.

As a practical matter, a vacuum (or pressure) assist will not improve the lauter efficiency when fly sparging.

A filter press is very effective at improving the lauter efficiency when doing no-sparge or batch sparge. It allows the brewer to extract almost all of the wort from the spent grain, without having to resort to adding more water for additional dilution.

Brew on :mug:
 
bracconiere said:
i'm still thinking sucking is better then blowing ;)...but i don't think rice adds diastatic power...
Click to expand...

Mmm no, more like, 6 row malt has enough enzymes to convert itself plus like 40%. Which means you can add starch from rice and the extra enzymes in your malt will convert the rice starch.

So instead of 10# of malt, you put 7# malt and 3# rice, then the extra enzymes from the 7# can convert the rice.
 
That will be a sticky mash, last time I used rice, milled it then boiled it very carefully in a good volume of water until well cooked then added to mash tun and put in the grains on the rest of the water. It was super thick and gloopy. Got there but hard work used 1.75lb of rice, 5.8 lb of 2 row some oat hulls ,glucanase and 8 oz of light crystal. Mashed at 50 celsius for 30 and then 60 at 65.5 celsius.
 
Interesting stuff about filter pressing, that tidbit's eluded me thus far... There could probably be a pretty long book just about recently challenged/updated brewing "wisdom," especially in homebrewing!
:bigmug:
 
Given my last brew with 60 percent efficiency and then a resparge of the grains to make another 9.5 litres at 1071 pre boil I think my grains need a damm good squeeze.
 
I think it's been covered, but vacuum pump wont' work. You won't really extract more, you'll just have a pile of wet grains sitting in a vacuum'd space. If you did anything to actually squeeze those grains it'd be far simpler to simply - squeeze them.

Also with a vacuum, if you did have a vessel that can handle it. PV=nRT is a fun thing. As the pressure dropped, the grains would begin to appear boil. Bubbles popping all over the place. After that they'd freeze, like a block of ice. I've actually seen vacuum applied to a clear enclosure with a cup of water inside and that's the sequence it goes through. "Boil" then freeze. I suppose the boiling might really have just been removing trapped air or something.

LODO guys might be interested in that though.... hmm.
 
tracer bullet said:
I suppose the boiling might really have just been removing trapped air or something.
Click to expand...
No it would have been boiling, just odd when it's cool. The pressure doesn't need to drop much to change the boiling point.
Reason for high altitude cooking courses to learn how to compensate, boiling an egg in 90 deg C water is a slow process.
 

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