dannythemanny
Well-Known Member
Frustrated at not being able to get above about 55% efficiency when mashing above 5kg of grain in my Klarstein all in one, and at the variability of extraction efficiency making recipe formulation very difficult, I decided to try a kind of batch sparge method today, and extraction was miles better at about 70%.
I mashed in with 3.5 L/kg. This is much thicker than I have been doing. When the mash was finished, what I did was, instead of lifting the grain basket out and sparging over it, I drained almost all of the sweet wort into a third vessel before draining in all the sparge water from my HLT, effectively batch sparging, then after a good stir and leaving it for ten minutes or so, I lifted the grains, gave them a squeeze and dumped the first runnings back in. I think not having a way to control the lauter makes effective fly sparging impossible on these machines. It's a little bit more of a faff, but now I can brew beers with a higher OG than 1.046.
I mashed in with 3.5 L/kg. This is much thicker than I have been doing. When the mash was finished, what I did was, instead of lifting the grain basket out and sparging over it, I drained almost all of the sweet wort into a third vessel before draining in all the sparge water from my HLT, effectively batch sparging, then after a good stir and leaving it for ten minutes or so, I lifted the grains, gave them a squeeze and dumped the first runnings back in. I think not having a way to control the lauter makes effective fly sparging impossible on these machines. It's a little bit more of a faff, but now I can brew beers with a higher OG than 1.046.