Kitchen Brewing Part 3: Sparge and Boil

The mash emerges from the oven.

Now that we're finished with Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, it's time to Sparge. As you can see from the photo, the grains have absorbed a lot of liquid. In a traditional all-grain setup, your Mash Tun has a valve at the bottom to release the first running of Wort. The grains are then rinsed with the sparge water to extract any remaining sugars. My stove-top method doesn't afford such luxury, so a different method is called for.

The grains have gained a little weight.

There are a couple of choices at this point. One choice is to lift the grain bag out of Pot A and place it into the sparge water in Pot B to steep for 10-15 minutes or more. The other is to lift the grain bag up, put a colander under it and slowly pour the sparge water through the grains into the original pot. I prefer the former, because I get a better extraction rate from my grains. All that absorption means that the grains weigh a lot more than they did going in, so be careful lifting.

Two pots ready to merge.

With 20 minutes left in the Mash, I start heating 1.75 gallons (6.6 liters) of sparge water in my second kettle (A quick note: there are lots of free online tools for calculating how much water to mash and sparge with. I'll be covering those tools in a future blog). My target Sparge temp is 168F (75C) with the grains in. Adding the grains to the water like I do will cause the water's temperature to drop. To compensate, I heat my sparge water to 180F (82C). Finding that number called for a bit of experimentation in previous batches. If you're off a couple of degrees in either direction, the world won't come to an end. However, if your sparge is much over 170F (77C), you risk chill haze in the finished beer. If you choose to use the pour-through method, you can heat the water to 168F and be good to go. If you use the steeping method, remove the grains from the sparge water and pour the resulting liquid into the first pot.

Now it's time to heat your wort to a boil. With either sparge method, if you're doing a full 2 1/2 gallon (9.5 liter) batch, you will have very little head space in your pot, so watching the pot to avoid a boil-over is important. Once the boil has started, put in your first hop edition and set a timer for 60 minutes. You can do a longer boil, but for my purposes here, 60 is fine. Once the boil is under control, you're safe to do other things in the kitchen while you wait. I usually clean up the second pot and any other utensils I've used that I'm done with. I might even drink some beer. Add your other hop additions and extra ingredients at their specified time in the recipe and wait for the timer to go off.

Yes, I really do use my freezer.

When the boil is over, you need to cool your wort. It will happily cool on its own sitting out for several hours, but the longer it sits, the greater the risk of infection and off flavors. Thankfully, you can speed things along. Most people recommend a wort chiller. They work brilliantly. However, they're pricy and use a tremendous amount of water for cooling. If you have a way to save that water and use it for other things cool. I don't and don't like the waste, so I do what I feel is the next best thing: use the freezer. The canning pot I use for boiling fits my freezer with room to spare. Just be sure to use a pot holder to avoid the hot pot melting the freezer's plastic lining. Leaving the pot in the freezer for three hours or so drops the wort temp down to between 80-90F. High tech? No. Water supply friendly? Yes.

Spent grains and hops headed to the compost mixer.

While you wait for the cooling, you can clean up the rest of your gear and figure out what to do with all those spent hops and grains. If you have, or know someone who has a garden, those leftovers make a great addition to the compost pile. In fact, mine have found their way into compost being used to fertilize hops a friend is growing.

When you're done cooling, it's time to put the wort into a sanitized fermentor. Even if you used a hop bag, I've found it's best to pour your wort through a mesh strainer. The strainer with catch errant hops and the sludge (a technical term for cold-break) that formed during cooling. Once the wort is in the fermentor, take a hydrometer reading, pitch the yeast, put on your sanitized fermentation lock and wait for the magic to start.

That pretty much does it for this part of the series. Stove-top Multi-Step Mashing will be up next.