No Sparge Vs Sparged Brewing The How, Why And Why Not

drink beer it's good for you hello and welcome to the video within this video we'll be looking at the pros and cons of sparging or not sparging your home brewed beer right from the start I want to make it very clear that there are no right or wrong ways here simply right and wrong ways for the individual the objective of this video is to assist and inform on both ways so that the individual can ultimately find what is right for them so let's get started the no sponge method simply involves heating the full volume of Brewing water both mash and sparge combined to at least your Mash temperature the low voltage Brewers will want to go higher this in itself can actually add teal Brew time but naturally this will vary depending on your voltage and the kilowatt power of your heating elements and your batch size however after your first mesh you will simply remove your grain and head onto the boil this means not only are you saving time by not sparging you're also Saving Time by not needing to mash out for 10 minutes on average overall you can expect to save up to 30 minutes usually but this will of course vary on those system and batch size variables so essentially this method offers a time saving this of course is a natural thing for many to look for within a process that can take some hours especially for those with busy lives so our next question just has to be why do we sparge as part of the regular Brewing process barging otherwise known as the lottering process has been a key part of Brewing since the early 1800s in one form or another in this time different methods have been developed and today within Homebrewing there are a choice of ways to go but ultimately the end results are going for a common goal or not go into any detail about these within this video and I will talk generally about the purpose of the sparge the reason we spelled is so that we can rinse the remaining sugars help with our grain which can actually vary this allows us to maximize on the potential sugars leading to a higher efficiency than if we had skipped the sparge also by using a spiral jet allows us to more accurately predict the outcome of our mesh and hit our desired numbers so that we were actually Brewing our recipe as intended without any need or hassle of Correction later on which will also take up time if you do not reach your numbers then a common way to correct is by the use of dry more extract which is also more expensive than grain some no Spanish Brewers use extra grain to compensate for the losses but this cannot always reach the same level of accuracy as a predicted sparge Brew with modern Brewing software now naturally sponging does take up some of our valuable time but you can actually save time with the sparge method in various ways one area is to invest in a Brewing System that has higher than average heating elements both kevlan's Brazil is 65 liter and 100 liter and brutal's 80 liter of sanctuary examples it also helps a great deal if you can Brew smaller batches as well as this will also save time on Heating and your sponge will be smaller and thus faster personally I use my bruzilla 65 liter Gen 4 system a lot simply because it offers a minimum batch size of just 5 liters and really fast heating with 3.5 kilowatts of power this makes it ideal for my small test batches as well as 2K batches should I wish let's now look further at comparison in comparing these two methods there is much more to this than simply a time saving at the potential expense of efficiency the real comparison here is really how does a no sparsh beer taste compared to a sponge one if you look online you will see a fair amount of discussion about all of this and there are also taste tests out there too grainfather have one such test which is shared with either their main website where they compare Sponge versus no sponge Bearer shown on screen now this tests they brewed the same recipe with both methods as you can see here the Spanish beer had a known gravity of 1.060 whereas the no sparsh beer had just reached 1.045 in this case a difference of efficiency of around 16 they also conducted a blind triangle tasting test where they were asked which beer was preferred which they felt was the no sparse version as you can see in this test 9 out of 10 preferred the Spanish version an 8 out of 10 were able to identify the nose bulge beer some tasted felt that Nano Splash beer was thinner metallic and did not carry the bitterness or fruit Aroma from the Hops as well as the Spanish beer did so according to this test the people involved much preferred the sponge version of the beer the website broilosophy are also known for their beer experiments and did a similar comparison with a Kosh in this test however the two beers actually were very close in gravity being just two points away in fact whilst this result comes as a surprise to me this is clearly a vastly different result to the first test by a grandfather and highlights that the no sponge method is harder to predict results wise as I mentioned earlier predictability is a very important area to ensure that you are brewing your recipe as intended within the blind taste test 26 people were asked to identify the no-smart beer and only 14 were able to correctly do this and only they went forward to the next taste test of these 14 seven said they preferred the sparsh beer three said they preferred the no Spanish beer and three said they had no taste preference whilst one reported no real difference whilst this test was not a massive thumbs down to no Smiles beer like the previous one from grainfather there were still more than twice the amount of people who preferred the smash beer so to summarize in both tests people preferred the Spanish beer in grandfather's test this was a majority of 90 percent and embryonofosphere's test 70 percent so there you have it well the choice is yours but personally I think not I just have to say that testing like this is not really telling me anything conclusive or in fact relevant to the individual this simply tells us what other people's taste buds found at the time within frankly a very small amount of testing frankly it's about as relevant as knowing if others prefer meat to fish or not if you prefer fish but most prefer meat does it really matter I think not you will only really know which you prefer by tasting them and of course just like beer there are many types of meat and fish and at the same time way too many variables that stop this kind of testing be anything like a real science I hope this video so far has given you enough information so that you can decide for yourself if you wish to try no sponge Brewing if you have not already I will now make some suggestions in the form of advice for those that wish to try this out firstly test for your own taste I suggest you test the method of recipes you are familiar with and perform your own side-by-side comparisons with both beers also it's important for a real result to make a variation of different tests do this more than a few times because our taste buds are actually changing all of the time even throughout adulthood though as you get older these decrease in size and also sensitivity they can also be strongly influenced what you have eaten and drunk before too so as such there is very limited value in single tests even when you are testing for your own taste after you have done all of this ask yourself if the saving of time is worth the difference if you taste one you may not you may even be one of the few that prefer a no Spanish beer in taste you will not know until you try unlike a brewery who simply has to consider the public taste majority of Home Brewers really only need to concern themselves with their own tastes which frankly is a great place to be for a change do let myself and the community know what you think within the comments section of this video I do hope that you found this video useful informative and interesting if so why not consider liking and subscribing for further support you can join the Channel's Facebook group and if you would like to support the channel then check out the Channel's merchandise store as all profits go back into the channel until next time happy Brewing

Channel: David Heath Homebrew

Views: 15,542

Keywords: homebrewing, homebrew, how to, beer, sparge, sparging, lautering and sparging

Id: q6mInDEwvZQ

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023