No Sparge!

[Michael]

I am continuously looking for ways to make my brew day shorter> BIAB was great for this, but I have found that I have a little more flexibility, and the ability to make bigger beer with my three vessel set-up. With this being the case, I have tried No Sparge for my last three batches.

Guys, I know this may not be right from an efficiency point of view, and I am spending a little more money on grain, but I am very please.I basically put the full amount from my HLT in to the mash tun, and after my mashing time is over, I recirculate it for a wee bit to make it more clear, then drain the wort.

I did it once out of being lazy, then afterwards saw this post by John Palmer: https://byo.com/stories/item/1375-skip-the-sparge

Apparently, this is certainly not a new thing to do!

It seems to work a treat for me. Has anyone else been doing this to make their brew-day a little easier / quicker?

[Dyl]

what efficiency are you getting?

Another thing you can do is start bringing your wort up to the boil at the same time as you sparge, and then just add the 2nd runnings in.  My burner (biggest kitchen element :-)) takes a while to come to the boil so I can save about 30 min there.

[Michael]

I am getting about 75% efficiency on moderately-sized beers. I usually get around 80% by sparging.

With such a small difference, I think I am becoming a fan of no sparge.

[Cain Harland]

At 75% efficiency and with grain being possibly the cheapest ingredient in a brew I can see why you wouldn't bother, but how much time do you recon you save?

I do the same as mmmm...beer and start my boil while sparging and seldom get to a boil by the end of the sparge. This may change as I have made a guard for my burner so expect the reduced heat loss and wind interference to improve my boil time and will be switching to batch sparge which will slow it down a bit but  hopefully bring the efficiency up.

[Michael]

Not sparging saves me about 20 minutes. This may not be a huge amount, but every little bit helps.

I begin heating as soon as there is enough wort as well.

Soon, I will have my boil kettle converted to electric. Hopefully this does not slow things down any.

[Doug Phillips]

Very interesting - I had been trying to find out what a wet mash would do to my wort but struggled to find any discussion/references at all.  I came down to figuring that a wet mash would dilute the enzymes and their food and thus the mash would take longer (or you get a drop in efficiency) - I guess this is made up for by the extra grain that Palmer is proposing.  Also a wet mash gives soluble proteins more chance to dissolve both in time and through osmosis.  Do these proteins precipitate in the hot and cold break?  I guess you can also argue that the sparge allows some dissolution of proteins.  The proposed no-sparge is a very wet mash.  My query was because I needed to either use the correct sparge amount or find somewhere for the excess diluted wort to go in order to form a filter bed in my mash tun - the usual technique is to recycle a few litres of wort to take out the particulates before draining to the BK and starting sparge.  I am opting for a Grant to take the excess wort to one side, but you have me thinking.  My wet mash seems always to allow particulates into the BK where the boil would dissolve at least some of their proteins - the proper formation of a filter bed at least goes for some consistency of filtering as Dave Miller aims for.  I will use a recycling pump for this.

Very interested in any results, meantime I will progress my use of a Grant and a Valentine.

[Michael]

To be fair, I do recirculate with my pump for about 5 minutes or so after the mash is finished. This does result in a very clear wort. Having said this, I do still get a hot and a cold break. It could be my imagination, but I do not seem to recall seeing a larger hot break, and the cold break looks similar to me as well. I do use irish moss, whirlfloc, or similar. (Depending on what is available.)

My main goal is not efficiency, but time and beer taste. As such, I do this, and as other noted above, I start heating the wort as soon as it is high enough in my boil kettle to turn the heat up.

After this, I think I will explore either pre-chilling the water before it enters the chiller, or a counterflow chiller. I used the pre-chilling in Miami mostly due to need. (The water was 23-25c out of the tap there.)

Any ideas you folks can offer that would reduce the time required for the brew day, whilst not compromising quality is much appreciated!

[Crusader-Rob]

I'm currently a BIAb no sparge kinda guy.
Looking into a simple3 vessel system. Although the time I save is more along the lines of 30mins to an hour, which I than use up with aeration pumps etc.

[Peter Smith]

My main goal is not efficiency, but time and beer taste.

I tend to find I like the smooth finish, mouthfeel and clean taste of beers made via 3 vessel with vorlauf etc,  but these brewers also tend to do water additions, use oxygen , actively plan fermentation temperatures steps and have a power of experience in recipe design...   their beers IMHO are often better then many craft commercial beers.   lots of experience goes into a good beer.

[mattd2]

I am currently on my way to a 3 vessel system - only 2 at the moment. Up until a few batches ago I was transferring the first runnings into a bucket then batch sparging with water from the kettle (and pouring the first runnings into the kettle once it was empty of sparge water). I started to think about doing no sparge similar to BIAB - just throw all the brewing water in the beginning of the mash. But I since decided to run a normal mash (3L/kg) and then at the end I pump the sparge water ontop before starting to recirc. My thoughts are the unmixed sparge water will hopefully rinse the grains a bit better during the initial vorlauf more than a full volume mash would.

I need to get some volume measurements in my kettle so I can actually check what my mash efficiency is to see if this actually works :-)