BelperRich
New Member
My first beer with the 50L Brewdevil kit was a 23L London Pride clone (thought I’d try and keep it simple for starters). For the mash, my plan was to lower the pre-filled grain basket into the liquor (about 17L as per the recipe) with the top part of the basket open initially so I could give it a good stir to prevent clumping/dry spots etc. and then fit the top of the basket. This didn’t work out because the level of water did not rise above the top of the grain bed. So all I could do was fit the top part of the basket and switch on the re-circulation pump and hope that there were no clumps. Is this a usual scenario?
I set up a fly sparging arrangement that consisted of a 16L water heater, feeding a rotary T-bar sparge arm via a 12V pump. This maybe worked too well – all the sparge water (about 15L) got pumped through to the raised grain basket in about 90-120 seconds – I’m convinced this was too quick; everything I’ve read re. sparging is that this should be a fairly slow process. Thoughts
The resulting OG after the boil was 1042; my target OG was 1048. I’m thinking this was the result of the sparge being too quick; as I can’t see what else I could have done with the mash – what’s the consensus here?
When I emptied out the grain basket, the grain looked different from when I was doing BIAB previously – it seemed more ‘solid/intact’ and less ‘mushy’ (sorry about these descriptions but I hope you catch my drift!). Again this adds to my thinking that the sparge was too quick.
I plan to slow down the fly sparge next time – maybe have some sort of switch/timer to turn on the pump for, say 5 seconds, and switch off for a minute or so to let the water filter through a lot slower – then repeat this cycle (5 seconds on 1 minute off) until the tank is drained. My other thought is – is it ok to lower the grain basket back into the wort after the fly sparge and do a hybrid fly/batch sparge? - or is that ‘crossing the streams’ in Ghostbuster parlance?
I set up a fly sparging arrangement that consisted of a 16L water heater, feeding a rotary T-bar sparge arm via a 12V pump. This maybe worked too well – all the sparge water (about 15L) got pumped through to the raised grain basket in about 90-120 seconds – I’m convinced this was too quick; everything I’ve read re. sparging is that this should be a fairly slow process. Thoughts
The resulting OG after the boil was 1042; my target OG was 1048. I’m thinking this was the result of the sparge being too quick; as I can’t see what else I could have done with the mash – what’s the consensus here?
When I emptied out the grain basket, the grain looked different from when I was doing BIAB previously – it seemed more ‘solid/intact’ and less ‘mushy’ (sorry about these descriptions but I hope you catch my drift!). Again this adds to my thinking that the sparge was too quick.
I plan to slow down the fly sparge next time – maybe have some sort of switch/timer to turn on the pump for, say 5 seconds, and switch off for a minute or so to let the water filter through a lot slower – then repeat this cycle (5 seconds on 1 minute off) until the tank is drained. My other thought is – is it ok to lower the grain basket back into the wort after the fly sparge and do a hybrid fly/batch sparge? - or is that ‘crossing the streams’ in Ghostbuster parlance?
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