You don’t need a sparge arm for this, although you can use one if you have it.

Fly sparging can be made less complicated, and less wasteful of water, than the way it is presented by some homebrew books, magazines, or websites. This is a description of “my” way of continuous sparging. It’s “my way” in the sense that this is how I do it, not that I was the first or only person to consider it. I call it pulsed sparging, but some commercial breweries do this as their method of continuous sparging and don’t have a special name for it. [Read more…]

A sparge arm

When I started brewing, continuous sparging (sometimes called fly sparging) was the only method for sparging a grain bed described on the homebrewing literature. Later, some homebrewers adopted batch sparging as their method of choice, and still later some homebrewers started using brew-in-a-bag methods.

A variety of criticisms have been lodged against fly sparging. I have an easy method of fly sparging that answers some of these criticisms — and the remaining ones are minor, in my opinion. (I’m convinced fly sparging is the best of the homebrew lautering methods, and I’ll explain why in a separate article. But for today, here’s the start of a “how to” article.) [Read more…]