6 Guys Brewing

An interesting thing happened yesterday when Bill and I decided we were both going to do all grain batches at the same time.  Actually, a lot of interesting things happened, but I’m going to focus on one thing.  Typically when doing an all grain batch, 3 vessels are needed, a hot liquor tank (used for sparging, mashing in and cleaning of various items).  Doing two all-grain at the same time should require 6 vessels.  Through a little hard work and planning, we came up with 6 vessels, at which point, everything went haywire.  You see, we only have one real mash tun (capable of water in on the top, and water out on the bottom, whilst maintaining temperature.  We, for some reason, decided to not use said vessel for either batch, and got into a bind when it came to mashing out (sparge) time.

For every all-grain batch we’ve done in the past, we’ve done fly sparging.  This is the method that is most familiar to all-grain brewers where you spend 45-60 minutes sprinkling ~176°F water on the top of the mash, while slowly draining out the bottom, until you get ~6.25g of wort.  This method is tried and true and gives good efficiency on the grain, and is easy to do, if you have 3 vessels.

As the mash time came to an end, we realized that we had selected the wrong equipment and would need to find a new way of sparging.  After scouring the internet for information about batch sparging, we decided to give it a whirl.  My first inclination was to take all my sparge water, dump it into the mash tun and drain the mash tun as quickly as possible.  THIS IS NOT THE CORRECT METHOD.  Batch sparging, when done correctly, will take about the same time as fly sparging, but requires less overall equipment, and allows for a shared hot liquor tank without complicated plumbing.

Now that we know how to not do batch sparging, and what some of the advantages are, let’s talk about how to do it.  One our particular recipes, we were supposed to have 6 gallons of sparge water for a 5g recipe.  The first thing we did was to open the mash tun about 1/2 open and let it drain into the boil kettle (after recirculating the same way as fly sparging).  This process should take 10-15 minutes and will garner about 2g of wort, depending on the recipe.  At this point, we added 1/2 of our sparge water (3g) to the mash tun, stirred it up, and let it sit for 5 minutes.  We then recirculated the wort until it ran clear and drained off the mash tun into the boil kettle over 10 minutes.  We repeated this process for the last 3g of sparge water and ran off enough liquid to give 6.25-6.5g in the boil kettle.

As you can probably see, it took almost an hour to sparge via the batch sparging method, and other than being able to share a HLT, and not requiring a fancy mash tun, it didn’t do a whole lot for us.  Some people even claim that the efficiency is lower by ~10%.  I’m not sure I agree with this, if you take your time with batch sparging, as one of our brews was well within the expected range (though the other was a little low).  We likely won’t do batch sparging again, so future evidence of efficiency may be lacking.

Without a doubt, batch sparging does work, and is a real alternative for people with less room, or who are lacking in equipment.  The lack of need for a 3-tiered system (when gravity feeding) is a real bonus for those who are attempting to try all-grain is a confined location.  Before we get out of here, I’ll list some advantages and disadvantages of fly and batch sparging, so you can make the best choice.

Tags: all grain, batch sparge, fly sparge, sparging