I am new to all grain and am having trouble understanding water volume calculations for higher OG beers.
Example - if a Wee Heavy recipie is for 16 + lbs of grain, at 1.5 Q/lb, that’s 6 gallons strike water + 2 gallons to raise the mash out temp. how much do you sparge with? Unless I’m wrong, the normal calculations @ 2 Q/lb, would be another 8 gallons!
Do you not sparge? If not, could you do a parti-gyle batch? Wait, that’s a whole other subject.
Maybe I missed something in the reading, or I’m just not all that smart, but I could use some advice.
Big beers are tricky, I’ve since gone to no sparge with them. You have to calculate your efficiency at ~55% and scale up the grain bill accordingly and yes you can do a second running.
[quote=“Captn 1775”]if a Wee Heavy recipie is for 16 + lbs of grain, at 1.5 Q/lb, that’s 6 gallons strike water + 2 gallons to raise the mash out temp. how much do you sparge with? Unless I’m wrong, the normal calculations @ 2 Q/lb, would be another 8 gallons![/quote]Trying to do a mash out with hot water is hard, you really need a heated mash tun. If I were going to batch sparge this I would mash in with 5.5 gallons, after the first running I would have about 3.5 gallons allowing for absorption. Then I would sparge with 3.5 gallons of 190° water and end up with 7 gallons pre boil and probably 68-72% efficiency. On my system I’d have to do a 90 minute boil to get it to 5 gallons.
You would mash in with 6.75 gallons at 1.5 ratio and would need 4.1 gallons for mash out then you would only need a gallon or two to sparge with collecting 6 gallons total water need about 12 gallons.
Make it easy on yourself and get the spreadsheet off my website on the recipes page. It was recently upgraded by member gregscsu and it does ALL the work for you.
