German Brewing

Ok. I've read the paper. Several times. I've asked some of the the questions.

My latest: how much fresh malt flavor am I sacrificing by doing a sparge? Our system would allow us to make 12 gallons or so with a no sparge, but if we maxed out the tun, we could make closer to 20 gallons if sparging to 4-5*P.

When implementing low o2 on our system, we could immerse a hose from the hlt to feed into the mash tun below the liquid level, so without o2 ingress (as opposed to the lawn-sprinkler type fly sparge arm we have that has been adding lots of o2).

Thanks again for sharing this great work guys!

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Well, great question. I would say No sparge is the culmination of low o2 first, possible benefits of more flavors second. However many years ago(early 2000's) I did a test where we brewed the same beer at varying efficiencies from 50 to high 90's in 10% intervals. The beer was a pale ale. The common consensus was that the middle efficiency beer 60-70 had better flavor than the lower and certainly better than the upper. We attributed this to the amount of grain in tun. I would say it's subjective at best. We have plenty of spargers in this group that have great success.

Ok so it sounds like even when adjusting for additional o2 ingress, assuming you had equal or lower DO readings, sparging made for a decidedly worse beer in your case. I was assuming we could deal with, or fully mitigate any negative o2 effects from the sparge.

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No dissolved oxygen meter for me (yet), which is why I'm hesitant to provide a definitive answer. I can't say really what caused the improvement, since I also was dialing in recipes and fermentation process. I will say that forgoing decoctions didn't cause a marked decrease in the beer.

I have sparged & found good success.
The main problem is keeping it in the keg.

I sparge, and I have no problems.

It would seem that any form of batch sparging that leaves an emptied grainbed prior to the sparge would ruin any attempts at low O2, is that correct? I guess if you're pushing argon or nitrogen into the grainbed as it's draining then you might be alright, but aside from that.