I brew all grain with a 10 gallon water cooler mash tun mostly 5 gallon batches. This morning I decided to do a 10 gallon batch and two questions were raised. The first one I have had for some time. I batch sparge and brewsmith advises to wash with a water temp of 168 so my first question is:
- Can I wash with water hotter than that? All the way up to boiling? Why or why not.
- Secondly I ended up with not as much preboil volume as planned in my boil kettle and did not have some heated water so I simply used hot tap water (110F) for the last 1.5 gallons. Is this ok? why or why not?