Denny, please remind me how long you normally stir after you’ve added your sparge water, and how long you let the grain bed settle after stirring, before running off the sparge. I’ve been stirring for about five minutes (usually 25 - 35 lbs malt for 10 - 12 gallon batches) using a big mash paddle and waiting for at least 10 minutes after that before running off.
Maybe a minute or two…
No time at all…I start running of right after stirring in the sparge water
I usually use more in the 16 lb. of malt for 5 gal. range. You may need to stir a bit longer with your volume, but maybe not. The key isn’t the amount of time, but just making sure you get the water and grain thoroughly mixed.
Thanks! I think I’ll stir a bit less time and see how it goes - it seems to improve my efficiency if I stir well.
All I can tell you is that it doesn’t make a difference in efficiency in my setup. The last batch I brewed had such a crazy high efficiency (according to Promash) that I’m afraid to mention it…
Yeah - I’ve seen your numbers - off the top of my head I recall you get 83% brewhouse efficiency for 1.065. I’ve been getting around 72%, and my last beer was 1.081 OG and I got 70% efficiency - WITH a blue cooler.
While you can use that study to glean some general info, the study was performed on one system, with the grain bills and crush, false bottom etc. on that one system. If you want to know what your system is doing you will need to measure it and perform a similar study.
or
you could just brew the Denny way.
Fred
The best thing about the Denny brew system is that it makes going all-grain easy and less intimidating. If it had not been for Denny’s old web-site (not been to the new one) I would have brewed my 30-40 extract beers and got bored with them and given up on home brewing several years ago.I will always be grateful for that 
As much fun as it was to build the spread sheet in excel, I am working on collecting raw data for my system which hopefully will translate well across the B3 sculpture line. My last brew session of Friday my sparge pump stroked me and I was not able to get any real info from it. I had primed my sparge pump and left the mash-tun valve open while waiting on the sparge water to finish heating up, and I’ll be if 2-3 gallons of wort did not flow through from the mash-tun over to the boil kettle by itself with flow control at all. There is always next time I guess. ;D
Bo, I’m confused (not that that’s difficult!). The 2 websites are exactly the same…
To defend “fly/continuous” sparging. . .
Fly sparging can be either really really simple, or you can make it nuclear science, your choice. I prefer the simple approach.
At some point I’ll have to put together a website. Has anyone done that for Batch Sparging? 
My sparge arm is my right arm, literally. I place a spaghetti strainer on top of the grain bed ad use a 2 qt plastic picture to move my sparge water from my HLT into my mash/lauter tun (10 gallon round cooler with a domed false bottom. Palmer’s book has instructions for building and designing a slotted manifold for either rectangular or round coolers. Not quite as simple as Denny’s braid, but close.
Procedure, I sparge with no additional water until the wort level is at/just below the grain bed. At this point I rapidly dump (pour) sparge water into the strainer on top of the grain bed. How much? It doesn’t matter!! just keep water over the grain bed, anything from .5 inch to 12 inches is fine.
Sparge rate is slow enough to not channel, which is what this thread is really about.
Measuring your results will show you how fast you can sparge on your system.
Simple yes, but for beginners I send them to Denny’s site
Fred
Fred, that’s just the way I used to fly sparge and one of the main reasons I switched over to batch sparging when I first read about it.
And I don’t think there’s any need to defend any type of sparging…for God’s sake, it’s just a way to get sugar from grain! 
I thought you had changed it when you switched the domain name.
Nope. Just redirected the new domain name to the old website.
Defense may be too strong a term.
More and more as I brew my “starters” I batch sparge, mostly because I can ignore it a little more, and believe me, I tend to ignore my fly sparges,
My big beers, with approximately a half sack of grain for a 5 gallon batch, I have to fly sparge. There is no extra room.
I never see anyone talking about how easy fly sparging is. I often feel an urge to talk about it when I get a chance.
I have espoused the ease of fly sparging in the past, but I agree… You never hear how easy it is often enough. Dang, it is as simple as it gets for me… I actually find a lot of relaxation watching my whirlygig go round and round! Anyone that knows me knows that the last thing I care about is efficiency too. Though I can get numbers easily into the 80’s, that is not my goal. I fly because that is how I have always done it…
I agree Fred and Lonnie, I think one of the problems is that to a “newbie” a write up describing fly sparging reads more complicated than it is. Even Charlie P. who is a very good entertaining writer seems to make fly sparging seem complicated in the Complete Joy of Homebrewing. IMO this is where Denny’s genius shows a little on his site…he explains it so simply with non-confusing words which keeps people from getting intimidated.
Maybe one of you two can put something up on this here interweb thingy that can help new people not be intimidated by the whole “you must keep an inch of water on top of the grain bed wile not allowing the drain to channel” Sure that sentence makes sense to people that have brew a few all-grain batches, but when you have never done a mash it seems complicated and confusing
I can only speak to where my head was when I started AG brewing, but I was pretty overwhelmed by all the new information just from basic AG brewing that anything that made the process even 1 step more complex (or potentially more expensive as well) was out of the question. Batch sparging, Denny’s page specifically, made sense & kept the process minimalistic in my mind.
Just an SS braid. I think I crush around .030" so maybe that makes it a little dustier. What were you crushing at when you batch sparged?
I’m trying to pitcher this in my mind…
It’s been up since 2002 - see Setup and Mashing Techniques off my page www.ipass.net/mpdixon
I agree that fly sparging is not all that difficult. But after I tried fly sparging, I found batch sparging to be much easier for me.