Hey guys
I'm just getting into the whole homebrew thing and am going to start looking for equipment soon. First, however, I've been doing some reading on the proces. I have a question about sparging.
By rinsing the grains with hot water, don't you simultaneously dilute the wort and thus affect the flavour?? Furthermore, how much water should sparging include. According the instructions on this site, you basically run the already-made wort over the grains while spraying it with hot water. So I'm guessing once all the wort has passed through the grains sparging is complete. or no??
grubac
sparging
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adm
Re: sparging
There's a few different approaches to sparging:
Fly sparging
Batch sparging
No sparge
(and probably more that I don't know about)
In effect, the idea is to mash the grain in a set amount of water to convert the starches to sugar, and to dissovle that sugar into solution. Then the idea is to collect all that sugar solution. The reason for sparging is that if you just drain off the first wort, you won't capture all the sugar. This is fine by the way, and is no sparge brewing - it just isn't a very efficient use of the grain.
The other two techniques, batch and fly sparging add additional water to wash some more of the sugar out of the grain. If you add too much water, then yes, you would dilute your wort too much and maybe wash out tannins from the grain that could lead to bad flavours. Quite how much water to use is the secret behind it all - in batch sparging, you use a set amount of water - and there's a wonderful expanation of the process and a volume calculator here.
With Fly (or continuous) sparging, it's a bit different. You keep sparging until the specific gravity of the wort you are extracting falls below a certain point. This is done by trickling a flow of hot water over the top of the grain bed in the mash tun, while draining thew wort out of the bottom and trying to match the flow to keep the grain bed covered.
Hope this helps!
Fly sparging
Batch sparging
No sparge
(and probably more that I don't know about)
In effect, the idea is to mash the grain in a set amount of water to convert the starches to sugar, and to dissovle that sugar into solution. Then the idea is to collect all that sugar solution. The reason for sparging is that if you just drain off the first wort, you won't capture all the sugar. This is fine by the way, and is no sparge brewing - it just isn't a very efficient use of the grain.
The other two techniques, batch and fly sparging add additional water to wash some more of the sugar out of the grain. If you add too much water, then yes, you would dilute your wort too much and maybe wash out tannins from the grain that could lead to bad flavours. Quite how much water to use is the secret behind it all - in batch sparging, you use a set amount of water - and there's a wonderful expanation of the process and a volume calculator here.
With Fly (or continuous) sparging, it's a bit different. You keep sparging until the specific gravity of the wort you are extracting falls below a certain point. This is done by trickling a flow of hot water over the top of the grain bed in the mash tun, while draining thew wort out of the bottom and trying to match the flow to keep the grain bed covered.
Hope this helps!
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Horden Hillbilly
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Re: sparging
If you want to see a simple step by step explanation of fly & batch sparging, click on the uk-homebrew link in my signature.grubac wrote:Hey guys
I'm just getting into the whole homebrew thing and am going to start looking for equipment soon. First, however, I've been doing some reading on the proces. I have a question about sparging.
By rinsing the grains with hot water, don't you simultaneously dilute the wort and thus affect the flavour?? Furthermore, how much water should sparging include. According the instructions on this site, you basically run the already-made wort over the grains while spraying it with hot water. So I'm guessing once all the wort has passed through the grains sparging is complete. or no??
grubac