I just discovered that the material I posted was proprietary. I have deleted my post. I apologize to the BA for posting it.
BYO magazine also recently posted an article about a German lager where the step mash is performed by direct heating of the mash tun. After several step-ups in temperature, they finally drain the sweet wort and then do a sort of triple batch sparge. I’m describing this based on memory, but essentially what was described was that you wanted to get half your volume from the first runnings as normal, but then after that you split your sparge into three equal parts, adding a third and draining completely, then repeating this process two more times. This process, also, sounded very much like batch sparging to me, with a twist in that they keep the mash very thick by only sparging a little bit at a time, three times. But I bet it would accomplish pretty close to your conventional batch sparge. This article, too, might have been written by Horst Dornbusch? Sometimes I have a pretty good memory… other times, not so much. But I just read the article about 10 days ago so I’m probably not too far off.
Thank you, Denny, for sharing. Interesting seeing that the Germans are not as far off from the conventional wisdom of the rest of the world as some might believe.
That does sound an awful lot like batch sparging. IIRC, Keith @ Yellowhammer is batch sparging. Do you know of other commercial breweries in the U.S. who do?
A mash filter is totally the way cool guys do it.
Not on the 15 bbl system I’m not.
Ok. Would it even be possible on the 15bbl system?
Its certainly possible but the efficiency hit adds up depending on your system size. And again depending on your system and if you have rakes or not, I would think all that stirring might get old too.
I don’t think there is a huge efficiency hit. I think that is a myth. The only limitation is the size of the MT. My MT has a motorized paddle so stirring would not be an issue. On lower gravity beers it would be possible for us to batch sparge and I have thought about it to save time but haven’t.
I remember another brewer who went pro telling us a few years ago that he was touring Miller and they were filling and draining the MT as fast as they could and that he said it looked like batch sparging.
I think that all things being equal, if you simply change from continuous sparging to batch sparging, you will see an efficiency hit. That isn’t to say you can’t redial in the system to get the same or maybe even better efficiency than you were getting.
There is also no doubt in my mind that for the same amount of sparge water used, continuous sparging will yield a higher lauter efficiency than batch sparging. Again, that isn’t to say you can’t adjust to compensate though.
Are these just gut feelings or do you have some data to support that?
C’mon Denny, this is the Internet. Data is not required to form opinions.
I think Kai Troester’s experiments and data support that.
I’ve seen some pro brewers say batch sparging is less efficient on their system. I’ve seen other pro brewers say it makes no difference on their system. Since all brewers don’t use the exact same system, it probably depends more on the equipment than the method. For instance: mash filters batch sparge, and they get 98%+ efficiency.
Mathematically, it makes sense. Increasing the number of batches in a batch-sparging regime increases efficiency, and fly-sparging is essentially just batch-sparging with an infinite number of batches.
Depending on the liquor-to-grist ratio and the number of batches, the difference could be anywhere from 1-5%.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t advocating one way or another. And I wasn’t saying the efficiency change would be large, but I said it would add up. On a 15P beer, on a 15 BBL system, 3% is somewhere in the realm of 15-20 pounds of grain. Every 3-4 batches you would be using up 1 more bag of grain than you needed to. If you have a tasting room, the beer prices can easily absorb that, even if you’re just a distributing brewery, you can likely absorb that.
Yes, it is completely dependent on equipment. It will depend on how much deadspace there is in the lautering vessel, etc. I was simply expressing the opinion that walking up to any random brewery’s brewhouse and deciding to batch sparge has a high chance of having a lower efficiency than is normal with that system because the overwhelming vast majority were designed for continuous sparge, obviously there are exceptions, like the folks who have Meura setups.
I was echoing the sort of sentiment Horst was expressing in his anecdote about attempting to brew an American style ale on a German system and experiencing a 20% efficiency drop.
Ultimately, if you’re buying a new brewhouse, you want a system designed around whatever technique(s) you have adopted in your brewery. If you’re stuck with an existing system, your technique choices will be somewhat bound by what the system was originally designed to handle. Continuous vs batch sparging is only one of those decisions, pellet vs whole, already milled grain vs milling on site, cleaning under pressure or not, caustic or alkaline+acid, etc.
Even if you happened to walk into a German brewery where you were all setup for batch sparging and then decided not to decoct because 4 out of 5 Dennys agree that it doesn’t make a difference, you would experience some serious problems because the system was designed around decocting (again just as Mr. Dornbusch shared).
OK, I’m convinced! 
Well, not necessarily. I know of at least two American brewpubs that have German-style, decoction-designed brewhouses but just use single infusion mashes.
How exactly is an American brewpub a German brewery? ;D
It depends on the manufacturer, but either way if you have a lauter/whirlpool combi (like ABT makes) instead of kettle/whirlpool (like Premiere makes), you have to make adjustments, you may be doing a single infusion but you probably have to do some form of a step mash (i.e. fire up the kettle to take you to a mash out temperature) to compensate for heat loss doing the sparge. Again depends how much rock wool you have on your lauter vessel I suppose
I didn’t care before but now I have to find out…