Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

With sparging especially in beer brewing do they collect until its above volume but below gravity then boil off to increase gravity?
Just wondering when to stop sparging when not boiling. Do i just stop sparging when i reach my wanted gravity? Regardless of volume?

Yes. In brewing we sparge over volume and boil it back to the right gravity. Basically.

Not entirely sure with no boil stilling. I expect its why lota ferment on the grain though. If your gravity is lower, you just need a bigger boiler for your still....

I just sparge to around 1010 there's not much sugar left at that sg, depending on how efficient my mash will decide how big my ferment is.

Sounds good coffee so you just takes sample while sparging with hydrometer till it hits 1.010 then call it quits. Sounds like a good approach cheers(I think maybe a big high flow parrot could be useful here.)

coffe addict wrote:I just sparge to around 1010 there's not much sugar left at that sg, depending on how efficient my mash will decide how big my ferment is.

I might need you to explain this in more detail, Coffe... sorry, I can be daft! 8-}

Because we aren't boiling the wort (as beer brewers are doing to infuse hops and kill of infections) so we are managing the volume of fluid we are using, for both the initial mashing and the follow up sparge. Now, we are just learning so am not yet 'full-bottle' BUT the general consensus is:
Mashing is 2.5-3L/Kg of grain, and
Sparging is ~1.5L/Kg of grain (still working on this!)

Boiling tends to denature the enzymes which stops them from working. You want to keep these going as the free up more sugars even thru the fermentation... aiming for a starting SG of 1.070ish... based on comments from others...

I've gotten to 1.043 so far, lol but I've only done 3AGs...

How many kg-final volume you doing ezi? I am going to aim for 1.5-1.75 per kilo... hadnt seen the sparge ratio before thanks for that . Keen as to get started. Trying to work out beersmith cheers

The other one "Brewmate" is a free down loadable app that I find pretty good .cheers hillzabilly ;-)

That sounds pretty low bluc. Hard not to end up with doughballs.

bluc wrote:How many kg-final volume you doing ezi? I am going to aim for 1.5-1.75 per kilo... hadnt seen the sparge ratio before thanks for that . Keen as to get started. Trying to work out beersmith cheers

Yer, I seem to be waaay to stoopid to drive Beersmith so can't comment. We have 1 x 15L mash tun - 4Kg & 12.5-13L water, 1 x 25L mash tun where we've slowly going up in grains (I recon it can take 7Kg, but we've only gone to 6Kg so far) & 19L water. The extra water is to compensate for the dry grain soaking up water... but I haven't cracked it yet... just documenting the bejeezus out of it. I'll go too far and then know my upper limit...

Google "can i mash it" there are calculators that tell you how much space is needed to mash x amount of grain at x mash thicknes.also sparge water As you said 2.5-3 seems common for thickness but i am looking at getting down to 1.25 which is do able apparently :music-deathmetal:

1.25 :scared-eek: wow that's thick! I know that at 2.5L/Kg our agitator grinds to a halt... that's why I added more.

I'm thinking it'd be like trying to eat a weetbix without milk... let us know!!

With sparging I don't worry about how much water I use I just keep sparging until what's coming out the bottom drops to 1010sg the volume I end up with changes depending on the efficiency of the mash and how well the liquid runs through the grain bed.
I start with 65kg in a 44gal drum and add 150L at around 70degrees to hit a temp of 63c.
I usually end up with around 1070sg which gives around 8% mash.
I've done a fair bit of reading and have come to the conclusion that most of it is written for beer and while following beer practices may result in a better end product it's simply not needed to produce a very nice drink. For example beer brewers do cold crashing and boiling to get the protein's to fall out of suspension. We accomplish this in our boilers, just remember that it's going to puke on heat up. I watch it rise into the second plate shut it down for ten minutes and go again with no further puking issues.

bluc wrote:How many kg-final volume you doing ezi? I am going to aim for 1.5-1.75 per kilo... hadnt seen the sparge ratio before thanks for that . Keen as to get started. Trying to work out beersmith cheers

Wow that is very thick. My drill struggles to mix at 3 to 1. How do you plan to mix it so you don't have dry lumps? Also why do you need to go so thick?

Sorry coffe that should have been 1.5-1.75kg per 5l to achieve my desired sg. I do want to try thick mashing though just to maximise yield from my mash tun. Everything is still only on paper. What i think i can do is probably vastly different to what can be done in reality..

That makes more sense now lol.
Yeah it'll work but just make sure that you get it all wet. It's not much thicker than what I'm doing.

bluc wrote:Sorry coffe that should have been 1.5-1.75kg per 5l...

That works out to be 3.3-2.8L of water to 1Kg of grain... same same... as Coffee, I took that to mean 1Kg of grain in 1.5-1.75L of water which I couldn't see working...

Came across this in "How to Brew":

Sparging is the rinsing of the grain bed to extract as much of the sugars from the grain as possible without extracting mouth-puckering tannins from the grain husks. Typically, 1.5 times as much water is used for sparging as for mashing (e.g., 8 lbs. malt at 2 qt./lb. = 4 gallon mash, so 6 gallons of sparge water). The temperature of the sparge water is important. The water should be no more than 170°F, as husk tannins become more soluble above this temperature, depending on wort pH. This could lead to astringency in the beer.

8lb is approx. 4Kg, 2qt is approx. 2L, 170F is 76.66667℃ and the Gallon is approx 4L...

Hope that is of use...

I tend to think those are more appropriate for beer as they sparge to a lower sg and then boil to reduce volume and raise sg to hit 5% worth. I know my sg and therefore alc % would be too low at the books recommend sparge rate. I typically use half the mash volume as sparge water. So 150 to 160 in the mash and 80ish for sparging. Easily hit 1070 if I want to..