Clarification please!

[JRTurner1234]

Hi,

I am using a recipe from Home Brew Beer by Greg Hughes.

I have the following instructions:

"For the mash: liquor 9.5 litres

For the boil: liquor 27 litres"

The first part is clear: I use 9.5 litres for the mash.

However, the second part is less clear:

Do I add the run off wort to the boiler and then add 27 litres into the boiler (so the total in the boiler is around 35 litres).

or

Do I add the wort to the boiler and then add water to bring the total in the boiler to 27 litres?

Thanks,
JT

 

[IainM]

The second one, to bring the total to 27 litres. However, you don't just drain the mash and add water, you need to sparge too.

 

[TheRedDarren]

That's right, 9.5 litres into the mash then use 17.5 as sparge water. Check your runnings and stop sparging when they get down to around 1.010/08 or it tastes astringent/tannic or you run out of water.
That should give you around 27 litres in the kettle. It might not be spot on due to looses to grain.

 

[simon12]

You need to add 1l water per 1kg grain + any dead space in the mash tun to Darren's quantities. Thats not much water for the mash, how much grain are you using?

 

[joshj3980]

Yes as stated above, you will need to add the 9,5L to the mash tun, and when you have finished the mash, drain the mash tun to the boiler and rinse the grains with more water to leave you with 27L in your boil kettle before you start.

 

[Halfacrem]

As above :)

The Greg Hughes recipes give the total water required for each recipe. To some degree, this is an estimate, because the actual amount of water you use will depend on your equipment (dead space in Mash Tun, boil off rates for your kettle etc..) Don't worry too much if you don't know these, go by the recipe and then adjust as necessary next time if you end up with loads more or less than you need.

The easy thing to do would be to deduct the Mash liquid from the total liquid for the recipe. This should give you a decent estimate as to how much water you need for the sparge.

 

[Simonh82]

Sorry if I'm repeating things but as it sounds like you aren't too familiar with the process I thought it would be useful to be specific.

Mash with 9.5L. After 60 minutes drain this into your kettle. Add another 10-11 litres and give it a good stir. Leave for 10 minutes then drain this off into your kettle. Add another 10-11 litres stir and drain again. You should end up with about 27L in the kettle which should boil down to about 20-22L in the fermentor. You need more than 27L total water as some will stay in the grain and some will get stuck in the dead space in the mash tun.

This process of rinsing the grain with fresh water is called sparging. I've suggested a double batch sparge (two rinses) others just do 1 sparge so might mash with ~12L and do a single sparge with about 20L. This would be quicker but you might extract a little less sugar from the grain.