$4.70 Sparge Arm
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Johnnyhitch1
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Are you going to be using a pump for a recirc?
Not sure how this is going to work for sparging,
you'll loose a ton of temp with the lid off and i wouldn't put 170* water in that bucket
WHy not just pour it in stir it up real good and close the lid??
Not sure how this is going to work for sparging,
you'll loose a ton of temp with the lid off and i wouldn't put 170* water in that bucket
WHy not just pour it in stir it up real good and close the lid??
wailingguitar
Well-Known Member
Zero issue with putting sparge water in that bucket, I have been doing that for years. I don't drain through a sparge arm though, I have a rectangular cooler tun that will hold the entire sparge volume in addition to the grain bed up to about a 22Plato mash. I recirc manually, dump my sparge water (175 degrees) into a similar bucket, start runoff then begin filling pitchers out of the spigot. Pour over a wooden spoon to diffuse it a little and get all of my sparge water in the tun in about ten minutes, after which I let it run off for another hour or so. I then bleach, rinse and use iodophor on the same bucket which will have been triple sanitized by the time I am done and becomes the fermenter for the current batch.
I still have to recirculate with a pitcher. As far as adding all of the sparge water to the bucket...wouldn't that essentially be a batch sparge? I've been sparging with that bucket and a piece of vinyl tubing, kind of like a hose, for over a year. I average around 75% efficiency currently. This setup should keep my numbers the same while making my brew day a little easier. 
As far as CPVC goes I have no clue what that is. I just looked for the plastic piping that said "drinking water".
As far as CPVC goes I have no clue what that is. I just looked for the plastic piping that said "drinking water".I read around about that beforehand. Apparently PVC can stand boiling water, just not while under pressure or for extended periods of time. The only thing that turns me off about PVC is that it has a very high chlorine content and I can't find any info as to whether or not that is transferable to water. This is my first DIY sparge arm. If things don't go well I'll try a different material. Thanks for the info though.
wailingguitar
Well-Known Member
I still have to recirculate with a pitcher. As far as adding all of the sparge water to the bucket...wouldn't that essentially be a batch sparge? I've been sparging with that bucket and a piece of vinyl tubing, kind of like a hose, for over a year. I average around 75% efficiency currently. This setup should keep my numbers the same while making my brew day a little easier.
Not the same as batch sparging because it isn't being mixed in. I'm floating the sparge water over the grain bed and it drains through the grain at the same rate as any "fly sparge" (a term which I personally despise)
biohazard-brewing
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I have not brewed anything other than an extract kit, but I was wondering about sparging. Would a watering can with a sprinkler head on it work as well or better than a pitcher and a spoon?
wailingguitar
Well-Known Member
definitely, as long as it was food grade material
Before I reply of just lime to say that I'm not trying to be right, but trying to understand the difference...
It sounds like you're batch sparging without stirring the grains and doing a second recirculation. I'm trying to wrap my head around how this is different or better than batch sparging. Both batch and fly sparges should be done at the same flow rate to maximize the waters time in contact with and therefore transference of available sugars. So... I'm a little confused about the popularly accepted method of batch sparging by trickling water onto the grain bed. If we can add the water all at once and get the same results (I'm assuming you have good efficiency with your method) then why does anyone go with the current method?
wailingguitar
Well-Known Member
If I understand your question, people think that you can compress the grain bed by floating the entirety of your sparge water on top of it. It doesn't happen. I do it because I get the same result as a 'fly sparge' (cringe again at that term) with less effort.
I actually began doing this when brewing at Bell's in the late 80s. We used 40 gallon Groen kettles for the brewhouse at the time, we would run off a certain volume of wort then fill the tun to the brim and close the lid. Later, at anoth brewery with an oversized mash tun, I had a screwy hlt that shared a pump with other systems. To avoid having to rush to clean stuff when I had several things going at once, I began to speed up the sparge (as opposed to the runoff) and ran the water all in at once. It remained floating above the grain bed and slowly flowed through as I ran off. On a commercial scale, most breweries don't have mash tuns that are large enough to do it that way and so use a continuous sparge. I can only assume that the notion that you slowly trickle and maintain a shallow amount of water over the mash filtered from there to home brewers.
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