Sparge Time

[jerryt]

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I just brewed my FIRST batch on The Electric Brewery 2 days ago. Have you heard of it?
I made The Electric IPA and everything went very well considering the normal "first time using new equipment / process issues". This is an EXACT Kal Clone (My tile is even grey).

I made a 5 gal batch instead of a 10 gal even though I have the 20 gal kettles because I want to brew about 5 -6 batches to play with different styles and recipes.

Anyway, BeerTools calculated that I got 85.15% Efficiency after I plugged in my pre- and post-boil gravity. Not too shabby but ... I want Kal's 95%.

Since I brewed for 5 gal I Sparged 7.9 gals into the boil kettle and boiled (60 min) to 6 gal. Kal's recipe called for a 60-90 minute sparge but since I had less wort to move, I ended up with about a 50 minute sparge. I could have "trickled" slower but I reasoned (right or wrong?) that the sparge time would be proportional to volume.

Could this have effected my efficiency?
Is the sparge time dependent upon volume?
Or should it be approximately 1 gal per 5 minutes regardless of volume?
Or should I go as slow as possible (does it hurt to go too slow).

Using Kal's Brew Day Step by Step of 1 gal per 5 minutes his sparge should be (14.9 gal x 5 min) 1 hour 14.5 minutes and my 7.9 gal sparge should have been 39.5 minute.

I am pretty sure that once I get my brew day routine running smoother, my efficiency should improve. I can also see that it will run smoother once I brew to full capacity (10 gal) as I have a small issue getting my wort pump to prime with only 4.25 gals of water in it. My HLT pump primes with a "Whoosh" with all that gravity and volume above it.

Thanks for your help/advice.

[Ben58]

Your sparge time seems reasonable. The other part of the equation, as far as efficiency is concerned is mash pH, as that also has an affect to conversion.

[kal]

[kal]

[Castermmt]

+1 on the PH, also look at your crush of the grain. 85% is good and should get a little better as you tweak a few things along the way. I started around 85% as well and I'm around 92% now days. That Electric IPA is a great beer, you'll wish you had had brewed the entire 10 gallons when the 5 are gone. Merry Christmas, Castermmt

[foomench]

A 50 minute sparge is a reasonable amount of time. I usually plan for 60.

But sparge time is not proportional to batch size. A 10 gallon batch shouldn't require twice the sparge time of a 5 gallon batch. The sparge time is dictated by the time is takes the sugars you've created in the mash to dissolve into solution, the sparge water. That's what really happening. Go too fast, and there is still sugar left in the bits of grain. If you have 15 pounds of grain and you sparge at a rate of 0.1 gallons per minute, that works out to the same water/grain exposure as if you had 30 pounds of grain and sparged at 0.2 gallons per minute. (I'm assuming comparable mash tun geometries.)

If you want to see this in action, use a refractometer to check the gravity coming out of the mash tun. The gravity overall will go down with time, but as you speed up and slow down the sparge, you can also see variation away from the overall trend. Take a reading, stop the sparge entirely for 10 minutes, then take another. You should see a spike up in the gravity reading. Of course this leads to the concept of batch sparging ...

[jerryt]

[foomench]

Your sparging time will be around an hour no matter the volume, possibly as low as 30 minutes, and you could go 90; but you should never need hours. Geometry of the mash tun and gravity of the beer will determine how much you might want to vary from the norm, but not the volume.

[Kevin59]

FWIW a friend of mine who manufactures a gas-fired homebrewing setup, and seems to know quite a few of the brewers in CO, once told me that many/most of those folks told him sparge time should be around 90 minutes, regardless of batch size.

Not sure how many actually take that amount of time, but I always try to control my sparge rate to take between 60 and 90 mins, usually closer to 60 mins.

[jerryt]

Follow up - 2nd batch

A follow up on my new system. I did a second brew (this time Janet's Brown Ale). This time I used 100% RO Water instead of 50% RO to 50% wellwater which is perfect except VERY hard (Bicarbonate 403). I was able to dial in the water perfectly and my pH was much easier to adjust (required minimal change).

The result was a 95.74% efficiency! So ... I guess I would attribute this to pH management. I really had to add a lot of Lactic Acid to my first Electric IPA batch to try and get the pH to behave both to mash and sparge water. (Though the Electric IPA tastes awesome).

I am still having an issue with the hop stopper "stopping" once exposed even though I am draining as slow as possible but I will put that in a new thread if it persists ...

[jbrace1]

My first batch was Kal's Electric Pale Ale on a Kal Clone. I followed his brew day directions step by step. I hit the numbers Kal reported for OG dead on.

My second batch was a Blue Moon clone. I sketched up the recipe in BeerSmith (as I had Kal's EPA). I got a little careless with the sparge (the wife said, 'wow, that went fast'--like it's the first time i heard that...) and I missed the OG by .006 (1.046 instead of predicted 1.052). I attribute this to the 'quick' sparge (definitely less than 30 minutes for a ten gallon batch).

My impression is that, if there is anywhere that it is tempting to 'cheat' to save a little time, it is the sparge. I'll not make that mistake again

[ajb]

I find grain crush is also a source of efficiency problems. I was getting very good and consistent efficiency for the last few, but it also appears in my system that the more grain in the bill, the slightly lower efficiency I see in terms of target pre boils and og. I am just beginning to worry about mash ph and hoping this is the rest of the puzzle.

[kal]

[kal]