Will doing 2 or 3 sparges (i.e. 3 or 4 run-offs, total, rather than just 2) be a help?
A study I read years back said that as long as it’s 15% open you’ll be OK.
Very informative post. Glad you asked the questions Red.
No, I think that will be the same since you will be using more water for each sparge if you sparge less.
You can always reduce the boil-off by reducing the heat.
Kai
And the production breweries are less.
http://byo.com/stories/wizard/article/section/121-mr-wizard/2078-im-currently-all-grain-brewing-and-ive-been-getting-a-rather-high-evaporation-rate
So if you want more volume before the onset of boiling I would simply add water to the kettle instead of running extra sparge water through the grain bed.
this is from the above article which is a better description of what i was trying to suggest
I have a fairly high boil off rate–1.3 to 1.4 gal/h–so i usually do this as well, particularly for low-gravity beers.
Great tips coming in, talk about crowd-sourcing! thanks all… I think I’ll take the following ideas and try to put them into practice:
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Try to only boil off 2 or 2.5 gal/hr rather than 5 with a combination of reduced heat and an added lid… which begs the question, how much of a boil do I need? With my steam-jacketed kettle, I can change, within literally 30-60 seconds, from just a mild simmer around the edge (the jacket) to a full (and I mean FULL) rolling boil. I usually aim for enough heat to keep the middle of the kettle bubbling (which means the circumference is definitely bubbling good too), but I can definitely turn it down to more of a simmer… but how much “boil action” do I need for hop resin extraction?
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So in order to only boil away 2 gallons, I’ll collect less wort, which will hopefully balance out my run-off volumes better…
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If I can’t get the boil low enough, I’ll still maybe just collect 12 or 13 gallons, and then add water to the kettle preboil as suggested by the BYO article and Don Weithman. Which begs the question: I assume that water would need to be the same water as I mashed and sparged with, i.e. if it’s my tap water, use that, or if it’s a recipe built on distilled water plus minerals, use that…?
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Acidify my sparge water down to 5.5, which sounds like a good thing to be doing in any case…
Did I miss anything?
-red
None, the hops acids will be converted regardless of the mechanical action. It is more important for blowing off DMS, but it doesn’t need to be jumping out of the kettle for that either. As long as it is visibly turning over a bit, that is good enough for me.
For top up water you can do whatever you like, you’ll just want to account for any differences in your recipe design.
i don’t know that i would get too hung up on the features of the water other than making sure there is no chloramine/chlorine, unless it is a particular flavor you are looking for. i would assume your ph adjustments are really pertinent to the water being used in the mash
i don’t think you need an aggressive boil off. again with my electric system it is not much of a boil off at all, i think 1/2 g per hour.
OK but how is the liquid moving? I did a boil off test this morning, with just water in my kettle, and trying to evaporate as little as possible, and over 90 minutes it went from 14 gal to 9.5 gal, at what I would call “barely” boiling, more like a rough simmer… this is less than I am used to doing in a 90min boil (19 gals → 11 gal) but I don’t know if it was making enough movement in the liquid. It certainly was evaporating, though, and maybe that’s all that matters. Just to remind you all, my kettle is 26" in diameter!
Try a lid, it will cut down a lot on your evaporation.
Tom has good advice. Think about a large kettle in a brewery, the stack is only a small part of the area of the kettle. The large breweries have a pretty active boil (the wort is jumping up high when you look in), but the boil off rate is in the 4-8% range.
The lid idea is today’s (or tomorrow’s) test!
But if that doesn’t work, how does my logic sound on this:
-collect ~6-7 gal first runnings as usual
-instead of collecting 9 gal sparge to make my 16 gal pre-boil for 60 min boils (or collecting 12 gals sparge for my 90 min boils) collect say 6 more gallons to get ~12 total pre-boil
-at the start of the boil, add whatever additional water I need to get up to 16 (or 19) gallons and boil as usual (although based on my tests, I could probably get away with only 14-15 gal preboil if I reduce the boil rate as I tried yesterday)
A few questions: Would I calculate out the added minerals using Kai’s spreadsheet based on the total preboil volume? Which would sort of concentrate the minerals in the mash but they would be diluted in the boil…
Or would I add calculate minerals just based on how much sparge water I am actually using? And in that case, should I add proportional amounts of minerals to the water I’m diluting the boil with, in other words use the same water for everything? To me, that makes the most sense…
-red
Well boiling with a lid didn’t cut down on evaporation much, even with about 85% covered I reduced it from 5gal/hr to 3.5gal/hr… So what does anyone think about these questions I posed yesterday:
Here are some pics of my kettle in action with its first batch. You had this beer red it was the number 7 or 8 I sent you. Remember this is only a 4 g kettle with a 1500 watt element.
Also for starts I would just prep your water like you have been but only sparge with the halfish or so and just get the remaining water in the kettle to near boiling then ramp up as you add the wort. You can see above that I don’t go gangbusters on my boils