Sparging with the Braumeister

[doctorthirsty]

I've brewed two batches now with cold sparging/rinsing, a pilsner lager and an IPA, giving me efficiencies of 92.2% and 87.7% respectively. I'm not going to bother with a comparison, those are good enough numbers for me

Also, I confirmed with Speidels that cold water* was fine and they not only agreed but said they usually cold sparge/rinse when they brew.

(* I say cold water, but I simply mean water at room temperature, and when this has made it through the hot malt in the pipe it actually doesn't drop the temperature of the wort very much at all. )

So if you are heating the sparge water for a BM, you are just wasting your time.

[Victor Coelho]

I've brewed two batches now with cold sparging/rinsing, a pilsner lager and an IPA, giving me efficiencies of 92.2% and 87.7% respectively. I'm not going to bother with a comparison, those are good enough numbers for me

Also, I confirmed with Speidels that cold water* was fine and they not only agreed but said they usually cold sparge/rinse when they brew.

(* I say cold water, but I simply mean water at room temperature, and when this has made it through the hot malt in the pipe it actually doesn't drop the temperature of the wort very much at all. )

So if you are heating the sparge water for a BM, you are just wasting your time.

+1

[leosardinha]

Not necessarilly wasting time as if you sparge with hot water you do not drop the temp of the wort and consequently it will take less time to get to boil.

[doctorthirsty]

The BM only measured a drop in wort temp of 1C (although to be fair i only sparge with 5 litres)

at the risk of repeating myself, when the water has gone through the hot malt pipe it is no longer cold.

I usually kick off the boil while the malt pipe is draining. As long as you don't forget about it ....

[Luis Coentrao]

I've brewed two batches now with cold sparging/rinsing, a pilsner lager and an IPA, giving me efficiencies of 92.2% and 87.7% respectively. I'm not going to bother with a comparison, those are good enough numbers for me

Hi,
Great efficiency there

Are you talking about "mash efficiency"? How did you get those numbers?
For the Lager Pilsner, how much grain and water (mash plus "sparge") did you use?
How was your Pre-Boil SG and volume?

[doctorthirsty]

yes you are right i was calculating the pre-boil efficiency since the extraction/sparge is kind of the area of interest here. sorry if that was misleading at all.

With 4kg of pilsner malt I used 25 litres for the mash, +5 for the rinse/sparge (nothing specific - i'm just using 5 litre bottles of water ) I had 26 litres pre-boil with a gravity of 1.045 => http://www.brewersfriend.com/brewhouse-efficiency/

The boil itself doesn't have much impact on efficiency but you lose some with what you leave behind in the BM. I had 21 litres into the fermentor with the OG at 1.052 which is an overall efficiency of 86%

That said I think efficiency numbers with such low volumes are probably not super accurate, but I quote this only to illustrate that cold sparging on the BM makes no real difference.

[Luis Coentrao]

yes you are right i was calculating the pre-boil efficiency since the extraction/sparge is kind of the area of interest here.

Hi,
That's I was talking about pre-boil efficiency (or, mash efficiency). Nice data.

[cpa4ny]

As someone previously pointed out - it's actually not "sparging" but more of "rinsing" the grains; sugar gets stuck inside the grist even though BM constantly recirculates through it. Hence my preference to rinse it out to bump up the mash efficiency.

I have largely avoided sparging up until now because its such a pain to have additional water heated and ready at the right temperature. It kind of defeats the whole point of having a BM if you also have to have another temperature controlled liquor tank.

So I was wondering, why can't we sparge with cold water ? With the BM we have already continuously sparged, and as you say we are just trying to rinse residual sugar out of the mash. I stand to be corrected but I don't think the cooler temperatures are going to produce unwanted flavours (like boiling water would with tannins). Yes it will obviously cool down the wort but I'd rather heat it up again in the BM than have another boil kettle on the go. Hotter water will dissolve more sugars but we are not close to reaching the limits of what the water can dissolve.

I have tried this once but I was not brave enough to sparge with more than 2 litres, but it didn't seem to create any problems.

Would be very interested to hear your thoughts.

My apologies for a late reply - just saw the message.

I understand that heating the sparge liquor to mash-out temps helps with washing out of the residual sugars.

BM manual seems to support that assessment (p.13 & 14). I quote it below verbatim:

" This process is known as “sparging” (process not essential). This so-called sparging is
performed by pouring water at 78°C (max 78°C!!! – not boiling water) into the top of
the malt pipe. Remove the upper filter plate including screen cloth and use a long
wooden spoon to pierce the spent grain a little so as to allow the “trapped” beer wort
to continue running off or draining. During purification, keep the temperature constant
at the preset 78°C. After 15-20 minutes of purification, remove the malt pipe
completely and dispose of the spent grain. "

I have no basis to second-guess German brewing experts, so I personally follow their recommendations.

[doctorthirsty]

As i said above, I also asked Speidels about this. They not only confirmed it was fine and that there are no disadvantages, but also state that they sparge with cold water too.

I will ask permission to post their email response here. Perhaps they will change the manual one day !

[doctorthirsty]

My email to Speidels:

Hi Irina

I have been wondering about sparging with cold water in the BM as its a pain to have to heat up additional water to a specific temperature. So usually I do not sparge, but this means my yield and volume are not really what i want them to be.

So I was wondering why we cannot just use cold water ? I think this can work for the Braumeister because we already have continuous sparging - our "sparge" is really just a rinse.

It defeats the purpose of having a single machine to perform mashing if we have to have a second hot liquor tank for sparging, so this would improve the whole process for all BM users considerably.

regards

Their reply:

Hi Mark,

you’re absolutely right!

We do make sparging with cold water and don’t see any disadvantages of it.

We continue immediately to heat up to the boiling temperature and don’t lose the time at all.

Best regards
Irina

Freundliche Grüße

Speidel Tank- und Behälterbau GmbH
i.A. Irina Wannenmacher
Vertrieb Braumeister

Krummenstraße 2 - 72131 Ofterdingen
Tel: +49 (0)7473 9462-46 - Fax: -99
i.wannenmacher@speidel-behaelter.de
http://www.speidel-behaelter.de

Amtsgericht Stuttgart HRB 381092
Geschäftsführer Georg Speidel, Stefan Speidel, Fabian Speidel
UST-ID-No DE 811 241 003

also

Cold water sparging is an advantage of the Braumeister system.
I think it does not really work with any other system.

Best regards
Ralf

Speidel Tank- und Behälterbau GmbH
i.A. Ralf Leukart
Vertriebsgruppenleiter

[McMullan]

My email to Speidels:

Hi Irina

I have been wondering about sparging with cold water in the BM as its a pain to have to heat up additional water to a specific temperature. So usually I do not sparge, but this means my yield and volume are not really what i want them to be.

So I was wondering why we cannot just use cold water ? I think this can work for the Braumeister because we already have continuous sparging - our "sparge" is really just a rinse.

It defeats the purpose of having a single machine to perform mashing if we have to have a second hot liquor tank for sparging, so this would improve the whole process for all BM users considerably.

regards

Their reply:

Hi Mark,

you’re absolutely right!

We do make sparging with cold water and don’t see any disadvantages of it.

We continue immediately to heat up to the boiling temperature and don’t lose the time at all.

Best regards
Irina

Freundliche Grüße

Speidel Tank- und Behälterbau GmbH
i.A. Irina Wannenmacher
Vertrieb Braumeister

Krummenstraße 2 - 72131 Ofterdingen
Tel: +49 (0)7473 9462-46 - Fax: -99
i.wannenmacher@speidel-behaelter.de
http://www.speidel-behaelter.de

Amtsgericht Stuttgart HRB 381092
Geschäftsführer Georg Speidel, Stefan Speidel, Fabian Speidel
UST-ID-No DE 811 241 003

also

Cold water sparging is an advantage of the Braumeister system.
I think it does not really work with any other system.

Best regards
Ralf

Speidel Tank- und Behälterbau GmbH
i.A. Ralf Leukart
Vertriebsgruppenleiter

Interesting. Presumably, any desirable sugars remaining in the grains/malt pipe would be readily dissolvable in water, whether cold or 78 degrees C. I have wondered what else might be rinsed out at 78 degrees. It would be interesting to try this for my standard brew, because I know how it should be. It would be even more interesting if others (interested) did the same for their standard brews and reported back with their comments. A very simple and potentially informative community experiment

[HopSong]

Is there any instruction to acidify the sparge water? Tannins would be something I would not want to extract.

[cpa4ny]

Interesting indeed that even Speidel says it's ok to sparge with cold water

One possible disadvantage that I see to it is that it may slow down the boil if you dump 7L of cold water on top of the grains.

I do acidify my sparge water to about 5.2 - 5.4 to avoid extracting any tannins from the grain bed.

[BrauTim]

I don't think tannin extraction would be a problem at this point. You are only rinsing the grains not holding it in the mash and the water is below 80c, for these two reasons tannin extraction would be unlikely. Therefore you would not need to worry about acidifying your rinsing/ sparging water.

[Luis Coentrao]

+1

Also, for the enthusiastics of high gravity beers, a cold rinse of the grains would be interesting for a double mash procedure. After alfa-rest at 70C of the "first round", it would be possible to lower the temperature of the mash (depending on the amount of rinse water and its temperature) to start the "second round" betwen protein-rest and beta-rest temperatures.

What do you think guys?