If anyone has any questions related to my article, post 'em here!
But first, a correction…in the final paragraph, the sentence that begins “The only downside…” should read…
“The only downside to batch sparging is that it may be too fast! A friend who brews 3 10 gal. batches at a time tried it and said it worked great, but didn’t leave him enough extra time to deal with them all!”
Anyone who knows me knows how ludicrous is it to think of me doing 3 10 gal. batches at a time!
I’ll definitely be looking for your article. Is this your first Zymurgy article?
I’ll also give you my review. 
Great article! Read it last night. I recently started batch sparging based on comments from the forum and don’t think I will switch back.
I’ve done at least one other (can’t remember if there were more than that) and a few for BYO.
I found it a well-written article. Thanks! I fly sparge, as it’s trivial for me to do on my cheap sculpture, but, if I was using an Igloo I’d switch.
Hey Denny,
I have a question for you. I use a 54 quart igloo cooler to batch sparge and am just getting into 10 gallon batch’s. I can’t for the life of me figure out what is the biggest beer I can do with this system. I’d like to be able to do a beer at 1.060 as like you say, life starts at 60! Any idea on how big a beer I can do on this system at 70% efficiency? I’m thinking that at the least, I’ll give it a try, and if I don’t reach 12+ gallons after Mash and Sparge I can always sparge again with a few extra gallons. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Yeah, about the only time I do more than a single sparge is when I’m making a larger batch or higher OG beer. With my 48 qt. cooler, I max out at 28 lb. of grain at 1 qt./lb. At that point the cooler is almost too full to stir. I can do 5 gal. of a 1.100 OG or 10 gal. of a 1.050 OG. There’s a great “Can I Mash It?” volume calculator at Green Bay Rackers--Mash Calculators .
Thanks Denny!
According to that calculator I think I can make it to 1.060. Is that calculator set up for 5 gallon batch’s though. That’s what I can’t tell with that calculator. I’m thinking trial and error on the first one, and double sparge if I have too! I really wanna make a 10 gallon batch of the GF Hop Head Red Clone I brewed earlier in the year!
What it’s telling you is how much volume your mash will occupy. Batch size is irrelevant.
HMMM…I think I need more coffee or something to get my brain juices flowing. It seems to me that batch size would matter because you’d use almost twice as much strike and sparge water for a 10 gallon versus 5 gallon batch. Maybe I’m just being dumb though.
Sorry for hijacking your thread by the way. I appreciate your help…you rock!
Or I am! I just realized that you;re looking for info on the whole process and that calculator only tells you how much volume your mash (grain and strike water) will occupy. After that, you kinda have to do the sparge empirically.
Right. My sparge is where it gets close, because the grain has already absorbed the strike water during the mash.
I was at my LHBS this last weekend, looking for a kit to convert a cooler. I talked to one of the people working there, asking if their kit would fit my cooler (it was a SS braid and a bulkhead. It looked right, just awful small). He said it would if it was a round cooler, but the square one I had wouldn’t work right, it would channel, and it would be just terrible. He then proceeded to draw me a diagram on how I could build a drain thingymabob out of PVC or copper. The whole time he was doing that, I kept thinking “but Denny says…” I ended up not buying the kit and walking out with only the latest issue of Zymurgy. I totally guffawed when I saw this article in it. I need to go back tell him to RTFM!
You might want to save the money on a bulkhead and look at my website for an alternative. Although it varies some deopending on which cooler you use, I’ve found that often a bulkhead doesn’t allow you o get the braid down on the floor of the cooler and you lose some wort because of it.
Too late, I already built it!
I attached a short piece of tubing to the barb on the inside of the cooler, then attached the hose braid to that. In my water drain test, I was able to drain about an inch or so below the bulkhead. How well that will work with grain in there… Well, I’ll find out in a couple of weeks.
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No prob, just prop the far end of the cooler with a couple of 2X4s. You wont capture all of the sparge lost the “dead space” but it helps. I’ve been looking for a cooler that has a channel for a lower spigot. I saw one once but it’s “the cooler that got away.”
Any sporting goods joint or even something like Wally-World ought to carry the Coleman Xtreme’s. The pic of mine shows the drain channel and I end up with about zero deadspace losses…
Denny - my name is Jeff, and I am a flysparger.
But I can also adapt to different things, so I have pulled out the old Rubbermaid orange (sorry) round cooler from my brewing equipment museum, and will try a batch sparge or three. Anything to take 30-45 minutes out of the brewday for some beers is a good thing to explore.
Is a Coleman Extreme in my future?
That’s the one! Will start looking for it…