Sparging

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smokey
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Sparging

Post by smokey » Tue Aug 28, 2018 9:23 am

Has anyone tried cold sparging? I have read a few different blogs about it and seen that some people use cold to like warm water for sparging. What do you do? Do you find it makes a difference?

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GAM
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Re: Sparging

Post by GAM » Tue Aug 28, 2018 10:47 am

I do a BIAB with a cold sparge. I use Beersmith to calculate the gravity. I use some extra some grain to get my pot full.

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Celiacbrew
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Re: Sparging

Post by Celiacbrew » Tue Aug 28, 2018 11:07 am

Used to do a cold sparge with my grainfather. Main thing I noticed was a longer time to get to boil. I have a relatively new tankless water heater in my house so I used hot tap water. If I didn’t I would have used cold water to avoid getting dissolved metals etc in my water. On my old system it didn’t make a difference in efficiency and I wasn’t worried about run off speed since my grain bed was always pretty thin. Channeling was what seemed to affect my efficiency the most. I think other systems with deeper grain beds and fly sparging probably worry more about sparge temp since it takes longer to flow through it.
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weisseguy
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Re: Sparging

Post by weisseguy » Tue Aug 28, 2018 3:30 pm

I’ve batch sparged at 168°F for every batch ever because BeerSmith told me to. I was always slightly short on my numbers so I tightened the gap on my mill and now I’m right on the money. My mash efficiency is still only about 70% but I don’t really wanna play with things too much now that my gear is in sync with BeerSmith and I’m happy with the results. I could see it taking a long ass time to get to a boil after cold sparging. If there’s no real difference in efficiency or anything I’d probably just stick with water that is as hot as you can get it...although maybe not higher than 168° (maybe?).


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Ruby
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Re: Sparging

Post by Ruby » Wed Sep 19, 2018 8:28 pm

There's an interesting comparison experiment by Brulosophy on this.

http://brulosophy.com/2016/04/11/sparge ... t-results/

Doesn't look like there's much in it. I've always brought my sparge water up to 75.6 for fly sparging, but after reading this, I think I'll save time, effort and energy and just get it from the hot tap!
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Brewhaha!
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Re: Sparging

Post by Brewhaha! » Wed Sep 19, 2018 10:02 pm

Interesting read.

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EastCoastHoppers
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Re: Sparging

Post by EastCoastHoppers » Fri Sep 21, 2018 7:00 am

Another good read here about sparge temp (by Denny Conn). I've always used hot so that I could get to the boil faster.

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/ ... enny-conn/

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PMackie
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Re: Sparging

Post by PMackie » Fri Sep 21, 2018 9:51 am

I was using hot batch sparge forever, but the past 4 or 5 brews I did cold and noticed littler to no difference in flavors and efficiency. The only thing that takes longer is the boil but really, it only adds an extra 15 minutes or so. Its a huge time saver in the end and one less thing to clean and sanitize.
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Brewhaha!
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Re: Sparging

Post by Brewhaha! » Fri Sep 21, 2018 8:03 pm

PMackie wrote:
Fri Sep 21, 2018 9:51 am
I was using hot batch sparge forever, but the past 4 or 5 brews I did cold and noticed littler to no difference in flavors and efficiency. The only thing that takes longer is the boil but really, it only adds an extra 15 minutes or so. Its a huge time saver in the end and one less thing to clean and sanitize.
Don't have to worry about buying a sparging tank, or heating your water to temp. Given this evidence, I feel like it's a no brainer to sparge with water at room temperature.

I am new to the whole brewing thing, but I am going to be doing this from now on. You need to think about efficiency in other ways (time and effort, energy costs), rather than just how much you're getting from your grain mass, which really is your lowest cost.

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Re: Sparging

Post by weisseguy » Sat Sep 22, 2018 7:38 am

My last brew was a Parti-Gyle brew where I brewed a RIS and another weak stout from 3 runnings of one mash. I did the first two runnings as normal with the second runnings sparge day 168°F but I just used warm water from my garden hose for the third runnings which approached nearly 1.03OG. I was surprised I hit that OG where the grain was already used twice and considering I didn’t use sparge water at “normal” temp. There’s certainly evidence that using 168°F sparge water really only serves to help get to a boil faster and really has no bearing on efficiency .


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