I’ll be starting to brew on a single-tier stand in the near future and would like to continue to batch sparge. All of the liquid will be transferred via my march pump. For mash in, I am going to transfer my hot liquor to the cooler mash tun via the ball valve I have going into the cooler. Could I do the same thing for the sparge? Or would it be better to just run the hose into the top of the cooler and let it flow on top of the grain? I realize this would be dangerously close to fly sparging.
Also, with batch sparging, how important is it to add all of the sparge water at once?
Sorry, I don’t have an answer, but I have also wondered about batch sparging on a single tier, with a pump.
It never made much sense to me. If you have to pump the water into the mash tun it would seem to me you might as well fly sparge? I am sure somebody will tell me why I am wrong ?
I watched a video of a gentleman pumping from the hot liquor tank into the outlet valve so he was pumping up.
He said it worked well and mixed the mash while he was pumping in. He then switched the hoses around so he could pull wort from the bottom and pump back on top to settle the grain bed
I batch sparge with a pump. In my set up, that just means after I pump the first runnings into the kettle, I pump all the sparge water into the MLT, stir, recirc for a couple minutes to vorlauf, then pump the rest of the wort into the kettle.
Yes, you need two pumps to fly sparge on a single tier stand. I batch sparge on mine. If you underlet your sparge water, you are going to disturb the grain bed. But if you stir your mash for batch sparging anyway, that shouldn’t matter much. I have a top port on my MLT with an adjustable return that I place just below the mash bed. I recirculate with the pump, and the return creates a bit of a stirring/whirlpool that seems to mix things up without really disturbing the bed. With a bazooka screen like I had on my cooler MLT, disturbing the bed wasn’t as big of a deal. But with the false bottom, I’m less inclined to stir things up. Seems more prone to channeling. On the other hand, the pump doesn’t seem to cause it to compact or stick too easily.
Sure you can underlet the sparge water, if I understand you correctly. If you don’t add all the sparge water at once, you’re not batch sparging, unless you mean multiple sparges becasue your cooler isn’t large enough. In that case, get a bigger cooler.
