Home of the BrewNosers

Anybody listen to a recent episode of Brewing with Style on brewing big beers? If you didn't, they discussed a technique where you basically mash a load of grain, collect the wort and sparge if appropriate. Then you use that wort as the strike water for a second mash. So if you wanted to make a beer with 30 lbs of grain for a barleywine or something - first mash would be maybe 17 lbs or so. Then you can mash the remaining 13 lbs with your collected wort. Jamil Z claims that this technique will give you the same yield as mashing the full amount but with no loss in efficiency. They also said you could do it a third time if you wanted. JZ made a 15% beer this way. Interesting concept. Anybody every try something like that? Been wanting to do a barely wine lately and I might try it.

Sounds like it would be good if you had a small mash tun or if you didn't want to boil for 2 hours to get your desired gravity.

Sounds like an experiment for a 2 - 3 gallon batch. I am too chicken to do a full batch.

Podcast is in my queue, but haven't actually listened to this episode yet. Sounds like a great idea though! I usually do two no sparge mashes on super big beers anyhow, and get just the worst efficiency as a result (don't have to boil down as much though). May try this next time as I'm hopeful it may even boost overall efficiency for the day.

There was a brewstrong episode a while back where they also talked about this. John Blichmann did an experiment to see whether it would work or not. I seem to remember they only lost a couple SG points on the second and third mashes compared to what John Palmer's table predicted.

I think this is called iterative mashing. I think there's some historical precedence in big Belgian brewing, but I know Omnipollo does this for some of their biggest beers. There's an instagram post about a triple mash buried there somewhere. Give it a go!

cool idea

Pretty sure that Green Flash does/did something this for Palate Wrecker. I think they were using hopped wort for their second/subsequent mashes though.

Considered doing this technique for a tripplebock but I ended up buying a larger mash tun. It's interesting to think of the effect this would have on mash chemistry as well. I know there's a bit of argument back and forth between the need to lower Sparge PH or not but you would be sparging with the same PH wort that the mash is at. I think it's been found that high sparge PH along with oversparging at too high temps can extract tannins but I haven't seen any actual tests.

For a big stout or something where you'd wanna avoid astringency there could be another positive here beyond just fitting a lot of beer through a small tun.

Fly sparge PH mostly is a problem with lower gravity beers (even then, there's debate). In a big stout, that would not be a problem. Also, you could just batch sparge and avoid that risk altogether.

I think when I try this technique on a RIS, I'm going to essential mash twice and not sparge at all.

Jayme wrote:Fly sparge PH mostly is a problem with lower gravity beers (even then, there's debate). In a big stout, that would not be a problem. Also, you could just batch sparge and avoid that risk altogether.

I think when I try this technique on a RIS, I'm going to essential mash twice and not sparge at all.

I think I'll sparge the first mash just to get a little extra volume as you should lose some in the second mash due to grain absorption. I suppose you could just use more strike water for the first mash. IDK. I feel like I have to try it to figure it out completely.

Makes sense, but even if you did want to sparge, you're not going to be letting it run off to a level where PH would be a concern.