Just read the Wort Quality and Water Ratio Question thread. I like reading threads that get the cogs turning and lead to more questions . . .
I’ve been a Denny Batcher for years and never really thought too much about how long the sparge water should sit in the grain before draining based on the total amount of grain. Should it sit longer for more grain, perhaps shorter for less grain, does it matter, and how long do you Batchers typically take when batch sparging?
I usually do 11 gallon batches with an average of 20 to 26 pounds of grain.
(btw . . why doesn’t the auto spell checker recognize the words sparge and sparging on this site)
For batch sparging, I just dump in the water, stir it around to get the sugars into solution, vorlauf, and run it out. I usually only open my valve to 1/4 - 1/2 way open, but never timed it.
+1. Just long enough to get it thoroughly stirred, unless you’re doing really hot water for a mashout. Then there might be some benefit to letting it sit 10-15 minutes. Personally I feel like I’d rather run off as quickly as possible. By the end of those 15 minutes the wort’s in the kettle and probably over 168°F anyway.
(Spell check is done by your browser and/or OS, not the server.)
dhacker - I do pretty much the same as you (12g batches - mostly 22-28lbs of grain) - and the first couple of years, I let the sparge sit for 15minutes before vorlauf and running, and then decided to try not letting it sit at all and just go right to the vorlauf. efficiency stayed the same as did the quality of the output, so I stopped for the most part.
Good to know! I’ve been doing double-batch sparges and would stir in, let sit for 5 minutes, stir again and then drain. So, eliminating the 5 minutes and second stir will cut about 15 minutes off the brew day. This will bring me really close to my target of 4hrs from first flame on to all cleaned up.
You could cut off even more time by doing only one sparge addition, too. Unless your tun isn’t large enough to hold all the water at once, my experience with 2 sparge additions is that any potential minimal gain isn’t worth the effort.
I’ll give that a try next - I’ve got the room. I eliminated the rest during the batch sparge for today’s brew and I’m fairly certain I did lose some efficiency. But, my numbers generally have a bit of flux, so tough to say if the change in process was the cause. I’ll have to do a few more this way before I know for sure.
About the only way you could lose efficiency by eliminating the rest is if you hadn’t gotten full conversion already and needed the extra few minutes for it to complete. That’s fairly unlikely and I’ve never seen it happen in my brewing. Other than that, there’s really nothing that happens during the “sparge rest”.
That is IT! No “Sparge Rest” for me either now. I amstill working on my setup and time. I got the 3 hours from dough in to flame out pretty solid, but the strike water heating anf cooling and cleaning is dragging my brew time out to 6-7 hours.
Next up is lighting the strike water much earlier. especially in this cold, the freezing MT needs a little fudge factor on heat anyway. Then I also need to be able to get the flame under the BK right away. Maybe use the wimpy burner to hold the sparge water.
