Beer Forum

i recently replaced my manifold with stainless steel braiding i took off a hot water outlet piping. should my efficiency have jumped by almost 20%?
i only ask because i pulled a justin and also switched from no sparge to batch sparging? i know, i know, i know, don't change more than one thing at a time but i only get to brew about one weekend end a month and it sounded like a good idea at the time. any thoughts on what improved my efficiency? thanks!

What did your efficiency used to be?

Did you crush differently?

Maybe the manifold you used to use SUCKED?? It may have caused a lot of channeling in the grainbed that you are no longer getting with the batch sparge.

Do it again a couple of times and see if you get the same numbers. 20% is an aweful lot, but now your beer is DEFINITELY more than 6%!

Rob

i was always around 60%, little higher or lower but it was always low. i knew the no sparge method was inefficient and grain is cheap. so when i changed instead of ending up around 1.062 i was at 1.078. i did my crush the same way.
my manifold was a copper pipes with slits cut halfway through. it was 4 pipes equally spaced sitting slit down in a 54 qt. cooler.
i was just curious which one it might be.

The type of manifold/screen doesn not have any impact on the efficiency when batch sparging. This is because it cannot effect how much sugar is left in the grain. It may however impact the clarity of the run-off.

Kai

Kaiser wrote:The type of manifold/screen doesn not have any impact on the efficiency when batch sparging. This is because it cannot effect how much sugar is left in the grain. It may however impact the clarity of the run-off.

Kai

I missed where he said "No SParge to Batch Sparge". I thought he went from Fly to Batch.

I just found a solution to a problem that I was having with my cooler mash/lauter tun:

When stirring the mash, I would disturb the stainless steel braid used to collect the wort at the bottom of the mash tun. I switched to a false bottom for a while, but I was getting chunks of grain in my wort no matter how long I recirculated. I decided to go back to the braid, which gave me really clean wort but made things hard to stir - a problem especially when batch sparging.

So I took a copper ground wire out of some ROMEX electrical cable - the bare wire without the rubber sheilding. I cut this to the lenght of my stainless steel braid and fed the wire into the stainless steel braid. Now the braid will hold its form and lay flat at the bottom of the mash tun. I wound it into a loose coil so that it covers a more evenly spaced area, rather than the random shape I'm sure that it used to assume left to its own preferences (it probably sat along the outside circumference of the cooler - drawing from along the outside wall, which doesn't seem optimal).

Here's some pix:

I would say your jump in eff. came mostly from the jump from no sparge to batch sparge. I usually get around 75 to 80 from a SS braid.

Most of the jump in efficiencies comes from a good crush in Batch Sparging.

Good thing about those SS braids is that they are pretty fine and produce a relatively clear wort after a couple of pints of vorlauf. I swear by them and would not recommend anything else at any price.