Archives for October 2013

A full wort boil is best, but smaller worts can be boiled, especially for darker, less hoppy beers.

Unlike all-grain brewers, extract brewers can boil almost any volume of wort they like — from volumes that are a fraction of the final batch volume to very large volumes. You can hypothetically dilute malt extract to almost any volume, boil it and still make beer. However, what is the best volume to boil for 5.0-gallon (19-L) batches?

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A helpful chart for batch sparger volumes using the most common mash thickness and common pre-boil volumes.

Here is a table to help batch spargers plan their brewday. The table gives the amount of water required to mash in with a 1.25 qt./lb. (2.6 L/kg) mash thickness and how much sparge water would be required to rehydrate the grist to that thickness. It also gives the volumes of wort that would be collected with one or two additions of sparge water. Finally, it gives the volumes of additional water to add to collect either 6.0 gallons or 6.5 gallons of pre-boil wort when sparging once.

This chart allows batch spargers to look up how much water to heat during the brewday and lets them estimate how long of a boil time to plan for. All the numbers were generated on a spreadsheet. If you are a batch sparger, you can easily make your own spreadsheet that can be altered to account for different mash thickness, different target pre-boil wort volumes, the presence of dead spaces in your lauter tun or other variables.

The numbers in this chart are in English units. I’ll post the metric equivalent in the next few days.

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Wort being collected in a kettle.

With continuous sparging, there is an optimal volume of wort that can be collected from a given weight of malted grain. If a brewer collects less than this amount, he is leaving sugars behind in the grain bed. If he exceeds this amount, he will get more sugars, but at the expense of extracting excess tannins from the grain husks, which will make his beer astringent. On my system, this happens around 0.65 gallons of wort per pound of grain. The exact volume varies (although not by much) and this is something a serious continuously-sparging homebrewer should determine for himself on his own system. But what about batch spargers?

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How much wort you should collect depends on which you value most, cost or convenience.

How much wort should you have in your kettle or brewpot before the boil? The answer depends on whether you are an all-grain or extract brewer. In addition, among all-grain brewers, the amount of wort you should collect depends on which you value more, extract efficiency or the time and energy to boil away more wort. In this series of articles, I’ll discuss each option with regards to extract efficiency, brewer effort required and beer quality.

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