The real reason married men should fly sparge?

[Tequilla6]

Hi,

I have been digging around the net looking for info on fly sparging, which I use because that's what my brew tutor showed me, when I went round to learn the intricate art of AG brewing. If master does it so the student should follow. My worry is the actual use of the HLT, the sparge water etc. However I found this little ditty to reinforce with myself the reason why it's better for me to fly sparge.

Fly Sparging
-------------
The wife: what are you doing?
Me (beer in hand): sparging.
The wife: oh, ok. let me know when you're done.

Batch Sparging
-------------
The wife: what are you doing?
Me (beer in hand): nothing.
The wife: oh, I've got some things I need you to do then.

Back to my question though. Using GW's Great Beer Engine, it gives two figures on a 26 Litre sample brew recipe
Total Liquor: 37 Litres
Mash Liquor: 13.4 Litres

So if total liquor is 37L,This is what I put in my HLT and treat with CRS etc, plus a few litres more for good luck, and of this the Mash Liquor is 13.4. The available fly sparge water would be 23.6L +- A few litres. Or should I be reading this as
Sparge Liquor: 37 Litres
Mash Liquor: 13.4 Litres

The reason for asking is by the time I get down to a SG of 1.006 where I should definitely stop fly sparging the wort in my boiler is always less than what is required but at a higher OG than the recipe specified. To which I either leave with a high OG or add additional water to get to my preboil volumes.

Can any other brew masters help out Grasshopper?
I contemplate this question as I'm sitting here busy fly sparging and looking at the long green grass that the wife wants cutting when I'm free.

Cheers

[ChrisG]

hmmm when I fly sparge it only takes 15mins.

[coatesg]

hmmm when I fly sparge it only takes 15mins.

Mine is about 45 min for a 5 gallon batch - any less and I'd be struggling to get water from the HLT into the tun quick enough, and I'd be worried about channelling and a hit on efficiency in my setup. (Though this is something I need to revisit when I do a new mash tun)

[jubby]

which I use because that's what my brew tutor showed me, when I went round to learn the intricate art of AG brewing. If master does it so the student should follow.

That made me laugh out loud I'm still learning myself.

Since your visit and following the discussion in the pub the other night regarding sparging, I now treat 45 litres of liquor in one go instead of treating and heating the mash and sparge liquor seperately. I then heat it, run off the required quantity into the mash tun and the rest is for the sparge. I always reach my stop gravity (which is 1.010) before I have collected enough wort. Therefore I top up the boiler to the pre boil volume that my brewing program states. I always have about 4 to 6 litres of liquor left over which i think is a good thing, just in case you need to top up. If I don't use it to top up, I use it to clean the mash tun. The end result is a wort of the correct quantity and gravity, but to achieve this, you must know all of your losses (as Chris said)

[Tequilla6]

Yeah, You can see that I'm still worrying about this subject. .. But with the continual drumming of the messages into my dense skull it finally sinking in and making sense.

[Tequilla6]

Back to beating this question to death....if I may

The last AG brew I have now completed and as I now have sight tubes on the HLT and Boiler I am much more certain with my volumes than I have been up until now. I used Beer Smith and Beer Engine to evaluate figures and to allow me to get comparisons. This is what I found based on program defaults. If these are correct then I think that , "By Jove, I may have it..."

The batch was a 25L batch based on a grain weight of 3.48Kg. The following quantities were specified by each of the programs..

Beer Smith
35.25L Total
10.38L Mash
24.87L Sparge

Beer Engine
34.60L Total
10.30L Mash
24.30L Sparge

So Both are almost the same figures, so that is a good start. However Beer Smith does give a little more info on expected Boil Volume which it suggested was 31.26L based on 9% boil losses and 1L Loss to trub ect, which is a figure I have not had before so happy with more info. Lets see how good this is. I have rounded up to the nearest 0.5L to make the maths simple. I hate complex maths.

So added 10.5L to my Mashtun. From figures obtained from the internet the grain absorption is around 1L per 1Kg so my first loss is from this and this is around 3.5L. Which means I have 7L available to me less the Mash Tun dead space which I estimated at 1L on test runs with no grain. This means I have 6L of available wort at the start of the process.

Next I added 25L of sparge water using the fly sparge method and at the end, keeping a maximum of 1/4" of visible sparge water at the top of the Mashtun during sparging which gave me 25 Litres of pre-boil wort to play with however the SG was not down to the max of 1.006 it was still at 1.008. So both HLT and Mashtun taps were closed so I could work out what was happening. Currently I am just over 5L short which is in the Mashtun at this time as I know there is 6 Litres of wort and Liquor still available in the Mashtun. So kept running the Mashtun now, not adding any water to the grains from the HLT and I managed to get another 4L before the Arbitrary 1.006 SG was reached. I now have 29L at a SG of 1.0035 and need to add 2.26L to get my pre-boil volume. Added around 2L and achieved my Pre-boil volume at a gravity of 1.033. That's good as Beer Smith also states the expected Pre-boil gravity and this is spot on as well.

Now I know that in the Mashtun there was another 2L of available wort and had I continued sparging I would have needed another 4L from the HLT to keep the constant 1/4" of visible sparge water during the fly sparge.

So here is the crux.
If I was to continue sparging, actual sparge water required and hence the total liquor volume is actually 6 Litres more than stated by both programs, 4 Litres which I would loose in the Mashtun as the Mashtun would still be full from the fly sparge and 2 Litres which were needed to top up the pre-boiled wort to the correct pre-boil volume at the required gravity. The two litres available in the Mashtun were at or below the 1.006 SG cut off point and not used.

Or as I did, once the stated 25L sparge water was used the HLT is turned off and the remaining 6L of sparge liquor from the Mashtun is drained until either it is EMPTY. In this case that would have meant no additional water would have been needed but I may have been leaching out unwanted stuff from the Mash or as I did turn the Mashtun off at a rough figure of 1.006SG which left 2 Litres of rejected wort in the Mashtun which I needed to supplement from the HLT water. In this case I would have been 2Ltrs short on the Total HLT liquor required.

From this experiment it seems that if I continue with the fly sparging I should on a normal 25Litre brew length be adding at least an additional 6 Litres to my total liquor volume. On this occasion I actually added just under 10 Litres.

I must say this brew was for me the most comfortable yet and the first one that I actually felt I was in control of having for the first time not run out of prepared HLT water and hitting my SG of 1.041 and getting around 26 Litres. Seems I can now work on my boil volume losses now to get that to a point where I'm happy.

Comments and advice welcome.

[Tequilla6]

Told you I was too anal about my sparge....

[GARYSMIFF]

Look into my Eye!!!


If you want to be Anal about it.
Its "Golly" not "Jolly"

"By Jolly I may have it..."



Anyway I have built a bridge and got over it.

Its an Art as well as a Science so they say.
LOL

[Philipek]

Anal Sparge is one of my favourite bands.

[Garth]

didn't they perform at Download the other week.....?

[Philipek]

Yes, they did, and they're opening for Genital Wort at The Bull and Gate on Thursday.

[Tequilla6]

I can see this thread is going down hill fast............ perhaps I should move my questions on fly sparging to a more serious or relevant thread

What I'm trying to reconcile is the fact that both software programs state similar amounts for total liquor which from my understanding is 6 Litres short for Fly sparging, which is why I have always run out of water during my AG brews . Now both programs could be wrong (Unlikely) or my understanding of fly sparging is wrong (Very Likely).

Nice try guys but Chris-x is the comedian around here as far as I'm concerned.

[subsub]

please don't use anal and sparge in the same sentence

Isn´t that colonic irrigation?

[Graham]

I can see this thread is going down hill fast............ perhaps I should move my questions on fly sparging to a more serious or relevant thread

What I'm trying to reconcile is the fact that both software programs state similar amounts for total liquor which from my understanding is 6 Litres short for Fly sparging, which is why I have always run out of water during my AG brews . Now both programs could be wrong (Unlikely) or my understanding of fly sparging is wrong (Very Likely).

Nice try guys but Chris-x is the comedian around here as far as I'm concerned.

I wouldn't trust the programmes to be correct at default values; there are too many variables for it to suit all systems - evaporation rates, dead-spaces and hop absorption. I am surprised that BeerSmith and BeerEngine tally so closely.

I will point out that the BeerEngine defaults and all the Wheeler recipes are based on not collecting more than the target brew-length in the boiler. One reason for this is that most people boil in Electims, Bruheats, and Burco boilers, and cannot safely collect much more than the target brew-length. Also, the commonly-held assertion that you should boil from a higher volume down to your target brew-length is, in my opinion, based on a fallacy regarding hop utilisation. You will still have the same amount of protein in the wort no matter what the volume is, so the same amount of hop bitterness will be absorbed by the protein, and thus hop utilisation is largely unaffected.

It is far simpler and requires far less calculation and less room for error if you stop sparging when either your gravity reaches your chosen bottom limit or when you have collected sufficient in your boiler - whichever comes first. With Burcos and the like your boiler will be full before reaching the bottom gravity limit. You then adjust to volume or gravity in the fermentor. If your volume or gravity does not meet expectations, then lower your efficiency figure in your software when calculating the next brew.

If one is going to sparge the hops, then you need less than the brew-length in the boiler (after the boil) to account for this. Dave Line (I believe) advocated hop sparging. I have always pooh-poohed the idea, but I will concede that there is probably no harm in it if it is done slowly and carefully. There is no doubt that a considerable amount of extract is tied up in the hops. Commerrcial brewers do not let that extract get away from them.

If you are not sparging the hops, then you can collect excess spargings in a jug and top up the boiler as it evaporates. It is still a good idea to have a little less than your target brew-length at the end of the boil, so that you have room for adjustment later.

Your sparging technique seems to be fine, although you do not give much detail on it. To bottom out at 1008 is fine too, some people advocate higher than that. Remember that the slower and gentler the sparge the greater the efficiency will be. The actual efficiency is not that important, it only makes a few pennies worth of difference, but knowing your efficiency is a good idea - for recipe tweaking.

You are probably worrying too much about getting the numbers to hit spot on; they are by their very nature approximations. From what I can make out it has all gone well. Probably better than most people on here achieve.

[Graham]

Yet again that bloke Chris beat me! I'm catching up with him though - he only beat me by a minute this time.