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Landon and I are brewing a 10 gallon batch of a Russian Imperial Stout this weekend. There will be at least 50 lbs of grain to mash, more than my sanke mashtun will hold.

My plan is to mash 2/3 of the total mash in my sanke tun and 1/3 in my Gott cooler tun.

My question is, how do I sparge.

One technique could be to add sparge water to the Gott tun and take the runnings from the Gott tun to the sanke tun to use as sparge liquor. Stop sparging the Gott tun at some point and use sparge water directly to the sanke tun. As strange as this technique sounds, I have heard of it before.

A second technique could be just to collect 2/3 of my preboil volume from the sanke tun and 1/3 from the Gott tun.

Other ideas? Let's discuss them.

Jimmy

Seems to me that the easiest thing would be to collect 2/3 from one and 1/3 from the other since you've got two brewers to attend to the separate sparges.

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Batch sparge the secondary cooler with your full volume of sparge water. Send its runnings by gravity into to the main mash.

You could also split (t-fitting) the fly sparge into both mash tuns then collect into the boil kettle.

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TheMacheteMasher wrote:.

Batch sparge the secondary cooler with your full volume of sparge water. Send its runnings by gravity into to the main mash.

You could also split (t-fitting) the fly sparge into both mash tuns then collect into the boil kettle.

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If you send it all through the secondary cooler won't you have an issue? My understanding is you don't want to sparge past 1.010 or you will start picking up some off flavors? Will that be offset by then going into the main mash?

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Batch sparging is less effective. Assume the entire batch was 2.5 Brix at 168F. This would allow you to pull everything over to the second mash as a fly sparge.

The runnings into the kettle would be no less than the initial 2.5 Brix.
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Well if you really want to do something crazy try double mashing. Split your grain bill in half and mash the first half normally. Sparge normally and collect a little bit more than your normal volume. Heat the wort you have collected up to about 165F or so then use it to infuse the second half of your grain bill and let it convert. Use the first wort to sparge the second mash and you should get a pretty high gravity wort once you are done. I have never tried this but I don't see any reason it shouldn't work (just read about it). Of course, I imagine it will make for quite the long brew day. You should be able to make some serious jet fuel doing this.

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Bill, I will be going a Scottish ale again with this style of brewing. I call it "double deuce" brewing and it does make the brewday longer. I will attempt to make a beer similar to Traquair house started the yeast last night. I will also add oak during primary to mimic barrel fermenting. The target OG is 1.080. The last beer turned out exceptional!

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Hell, I think if I were gonna try that I would go for something even bigger. I can get a 1.080 beer out of my current set up doing single mashing (just barely) I would probably try to get maybe 30 or 40 points higher; but then of course I'm greedy.

Here is an update to what we did.

We mashed 52 lbs of grain in two tuns. 33 lbs in my sanke tun, 19 lbs in my Gott tun. We mashed in at 1.125 qts per pound. I now know that that is the maximum I can mash in the sanke tun.

We put the 8 lbs of roast malt and 25 lbs of Maris Otter in the sanke tun and 19 lbs of only Maris Otter in the Gott tun. My idea was to use the pure pale malt in the Gott as a replacement for using LME or DME to supplement using only my sanke tun.

We only had 7 gallons to sparge with. We added sparge water in the percentage of the grain mass, 4.7 gal to the sanke tun and 2.3 to the Gott tun.

We collected 10 gal from the sanke tun which was its percentage in the pre-boil volume of 15 gal. We then used 3 gal from the Gott tun to reach the sugar we needed to get to an 1.078 pre-boil gravity. We added 2 gal of RO water to get the 15 gal pre-boil volume. We left a considerable amount of sugar in the Gott tun. The extra in the Gott tun was to insure we had plenty of sugar since I was unsure of my efficiency when doing a beer this big. We had Beersmith set to 65% efficiency.

After a 90 minute boil we hit our starting gravity of 1.099.

I think I would have had plenty of sugar if my efficiency was set to 75%.

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Jimmy, sounds like you got great efficiency in the mash ~74% what was the temp for each step.

Do you feel the thicker grist helped with the efficiency?

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It was a single step infusion at 154F. We did a mashout step to 168F, that was direct fired to the sanke tun. We did not mashout on the Gott tun.

I don't know how much the thickness of the mash made. It was 1.125 qt/lb. I usually go with 1.25 so not much difference from the 1.125.

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Now that its done. Any tips on making a better process next round?

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The only thing I think I would change is my efficiency. I would try 75%. It worked pretty good.