Fly Sparge Equipment

[NickP]

Has anyone got any ideas of what can be made or bought for fly sparging, at the moment I use the lid of a tupaware box floated ontop of the mash, and then add the water onto that to save disturbing the grain bed while this works ok, im wondering if there are any better methods

[myke2008]

Hi,

Hop and Grape sell something that they make. Not sure what it's like as I use the method you do and at the moment quite happy with it. Although I do fancy making a fly sparger one day.

[CJBrew]

For about the last 30 AG brews I've done, I've simply poured sparge water gently onto the grain, using a saucepan.

YMMV.

However I have inherited (from another brewer who gave me a lot of old kit) an odd bit of metal in the shape of a flat bowl with holes in, basically a colander but I'm not sure what it used to be part of... I'm going to attach this to the lid of my mash tun, with an inlet tube feeding into this bowl thing through the lid, with a tank connector.

This will have a flexi hose attached to it via compression fittings and 1/2" tap connector, and that will feed from the HLT, which has a ballvalve.

so

Code: Select all

|       |
|~~~~~~~|
| o o  o|
|    o  |
|   o   |
|o HLT  ---(ballvalve)---\
=========                |
                         |
                    [====|====]
                    | \-.-.-/ |
                    |         |
                    |         |
                    |,.,...,..|
                    |..,,.,.,.|
                    |,..,..,.,|
                    |,..,.,.,.|
                    |..MMMMM---(ballvalve)-\
                    ===========             |
                                            v   to kettle

[myke2008]

However I have inherited (from another brewer who gave me a lot of old kit) an odd bit of metal in the shape of a flat bowl with holes in, basically a colander but I'm not sure what it used to be part of

Just incase you couldn't sleep wondering I would guess it was a false bottom used in a mash tun. I have never used a false bottom but read plenty of threads on here about them. (if its not that shoot me down!)

[befuggled]

This is what I bodged from an American idea.
You can only just make out the sparge water flowing in from the HLT



The idea of fly sparging is to keep the grain bed floating and undisturbed. I made several rotating sparge arms, but found that the flow rate needed to rotate them was much higher than the flow rate needed for ideal sparging, i.e to last as long as 90 minutes for some brews.
Works well for me, I usually have to stop sparging at about 1005 before I have collected the whole boil volume, so I must be getting most of the sugar out!
It does not need to be round (ish ) you just need to support some sort of grid just above the grains.
I have got a windscreen wiper motor put by for a motorised rotating arm, you will find threads on that elsewhere, but for the time being KISS
Good luck!

[CJBrew]

> Just incase you couldn't sleep wondering I would guess it was a false bottom used in a mash tun. I have never used a false
> bottom but read plenty of threads on here about them. (if its not that shoot me down!)

Indeed I have wondered about that. It looks manufactured though. The holes are accurately spaced and neatly drilled. Also, the holes are rather large for a mash tun screen, maybe 5mm diameter.

Anyway, when I bodged it up with a couple of plastic lids and ran tap water through, it seemed to create a nice drizzle of droplets. Certainly not as fine as from a shower head but much cheaper to put together.

[Evanvine]

I’ve always used a 5 gal plastic sherry/cider barrel with tap.
This is raised about 2ft above the sparge tun and has a 2 ½ ft length of flexible 1/2“ hose fitted with a small watering can rose.
I swing this manually in a rotating orbital motion adjusting the flow with the tap.
The flow rate is adjusted so that there is no surface water on the mash and I have the sparge tun tap fully open.
Over the last 20 odd years I have achieved an average 86% mash efficiency.
PS You need to wear a glove to hold the hose!