I mash with my typical 1.5 qt/# grain in my mash tun. Then use some Palmer calculations to determine the necessary amount of sparge water to add after my conversion rest to reach my pre-boil amount in the kettle that is desired. This gets added back to the mash tun and heated properly to obtain a 168-170F mash out for 10 minutes or so, prior to recirculating and then draining into the kettle.
For me, no sparge efficiency depends on the OG. My “normal” is about 83%. No sparge on a big beer (1.100) I get in the 55-65% range. No sparge on a small beer (1.045ish) is more like 75-80%. But I use different no sparge techniques on each of those. For the big beer, I add no additional water after the mash…simply run it off and that’s my boil volume. For a small beer, I mash at maybe 1.75-2 qt./lb. After the mash is complete, I add in the amount of water I need to hit my boil volume and run it all off once once. To me, both of those are ways of doing no sparge.
I got 69% efficiency on my last no sparge. I normally get around 80%. Not a huge drop. Wouldn’t warrant a 30-40% increase in the grain bill.
If your tun has room, you could mash with the full liquor volume and the residual water left behind would have less sugar, so you’d get higher efficiency. Might not be possible with a big beer and a small mash tun though.
Right. I was just speaking generally.
If you want to generalize you can just divide volume of runnings by total mash vol and multiply that by the efficiency you normally get.
Eg, looking at one of my recent recipes:
3kg grain*
24 litres mash liquor
So 3 litres water lost in grain absorption (1 litre per kg)
Therefore runnings = 21 litres
21/24 = 0.875
Expected efficiency = 0.875 normal efficiency. But note that’s an underestimate because a normal sparge stops before you get every bit of sugar out.
As Denny points out, not so great for bigger beers (something I don’t brew).
- apologies for metric…
Interesting but based essentially on absorption. This would vary wildly across a range of gravities.
Very interesting way of looking at it though. I’m definitely a fan of back of the envelope approximations.
I know a lot of homebrewers shoot higher, but the average abv of beer is 4-5%, which is what the recipe above was. So on average, fall in efficiency is around 10%. If you brew stronger beer, no sparge won’t work out quite so well. If you mash with less than full liquor volume then that will also reduce efficiency.
IIRC, you are just using a larger mash tun for your bigger beers, correct?
Denny, on adding the remaining water after the mash is complete: for my workflow this would work almost as easily as adding all the water at once, which is what I do now, so I’d be curious to know your rationale (efficiency, flavor, etc.). I think someone else in this thread mentioned doing this too.
70 qt. for 5 gal., 152 qt. for 10+ gal.
well, it’s based at least in part on the fact that it’s the way I learned to do no sparge 18 years ago. Also, I like to stay in a somewhat “normal” mash ratio range. Now, that may be misguided, but it’s my theory. And it works.
Not misguided, thin mashes raise mash pH because the buffering power of the malt is weaker. You need to be careful with water treatment if you mash with the full liquor volume. Mashing thick guarantees good pH, at the cost of lower efficiency (if you skip the sparge).
Same reasoning for me. I don’t want to thin out the mash too much for the enzymes to do their work.
Thanks. It would be easy enough to try, and I could do a rebrew of one of my favorites. A small change to the process. At mash temp or at higher “mash-out” temp?
So if I heat my sparge water as per my normal batch sparge procedure and then add the sparge water before draining the tun I will get a more malty beer flavor at the cost of lower efficiency? Has anyone tried opening the gap on their mill to lower efficiency to get the same effect? Both would require extra malt in the mash to compensate for the lower efficiency.
Are you referring to the mash out water temperature? If so, that is dependent for me on the mash temp I used (and amount of water and grain in the tun). If I mash around 150 then I will definitely heat the remaining mash out water to 196-200F or so to even get the mash up to 168-170F. Have cold water/ice cubes on hand to bring the temp down if you go too high.
If my mash temp is 155F (or so) then I probably only heat to around 192-195F to account for the warmer mash temp already have more degrees of heat. For me, it is trial and error, taking good notes and using those numbers to adjust for future brews.
I don’t think it has anything to do with lower efficiency necessarily. I’m also not sure I’d claim to get a maltier beer with no sparge. Being subjective, that’s kinda hard to quantify and AFIAK there is no empirical evidence to support that.
I took the more malty from the first page of this thread when someone ask what types of beer benefit from no sparge. Answer was malty beers. I guess I misinterpreted that to mean no sparge makes the beer more malty.
I’ll have to try no sparge to see what it does to my beer.
Guilty. That was thrown out by me.
Another case of regurgitating info passed around. A 1ˢᵗ runnings beer is a no-sparge and has a maltier flavor, no? [emoji848]
Maybe there is a Δ between people’s understanding of the process. I myself seem to have mixed up first runnings and no-sparge on a few occasions.
A real plus for no sparge seems to be pH stability.