BIABrewer.info

"No-sparge," mashing is a term that is commonly misunderstood and mis-used across the internet. BIAB is even sometimes referred to as a no-sparge method. This is incorrect.

BIAB is a method that exposes the grist (crushed grain) to the full volume of water required in the brew at the start of the mash. Traditional methods such as batch-sparging and fly-sparging expose about half this volume to the grist at the beginning of the mash. After the mash this is drained into the kettle and then the second half is introduced to the grain, sometimes in stages, and subsequently drained into the kettle. To do this requires two extra vessels, the 'hot liquor (water) tank' and a 'mash tun.' BIAB enables the kettle to also act as the HLT and mash tun.

Sparging really means to "rinse" the grain. BIAB does this. It simply starts the rinse earlier than traditional methods.

So, what is the "No-Sparge" Method?

The true 'no-sparge' method involves not allowing about half of your full-volume to ever come into contact with the grist. So, the grist does not get 'rinsed.' Instead, the water usually used for sparging gets added directly to the kettle.

Obviously, a failure to rinse means that a lower original gravity will result. To combat this, 'no-spargers,' will increase their grain bill by about a third.

If you need a third more grain, why would anyone "No-Sparge?"

In the BJCP manual there is an article by Louis Bonham. The article begins with...

The theory is that it creates a richer, maltier beer. For traditional brewers it also speeds the brewing process up by eliminating the sparge step. Most brewer's palates though would not be able to detect the difference between a no-sparged brew, a full-volume brew (such as BIAB) and a traditionally sparged brew.

Bonham designed an elegant and thorough experiment between a 'no-sparge' beer and a 'sparged' beer. Eight out of thirteen judges/industry professionals were able to taste a difference in 'triangular' tastings. The findings of these eight gets a little vague... "most of [these eight] reported the ['no-sparge'] beer tasted richer and maltier."

How Would I "No-Sparge" a BIAB?

I personally would not advise any brewer to test no-sparge unless they simultaneously brewed a control which is impossible unless you have two BIAB set-ups*. Expectations can have a great effect on taste buds .

Some brewers however seem to have a knack for identifying small differences between beers of similiar recipe brewed on different systems at different times. These brewers can easily do a 'no-sparge' BIAB. Simply take your normal recipe and increase the grain bill by a third. Instead of adding all your water to the mash, hold back a half. Mash as normal and pull the bag. Add your remaing half of water before the boil is reached. (Preferably pre-heat this to at least 76 C. If this is not possible, just add it gradually pre-boil.)

Cheers,
Pat

* I'll write how to do this if it is of interest.

Interesting. So if you hold back some of your water to do a rinse sparge you may be closer to the 3V no sparge method because you'd have a thicker grist? Or is it the quality of the wort you get from more grain? (Meaning as you extract sugars from a grain, are the sugars you extract at the lower efficiency rates higher quality than the sugars you get at the higher efficiency rates.) For example, is it the grist thickness or the amount of grain that makes the "difference?" A mash with more grains and lower efficiency provides the "difference" or a thicker mash provides the "difference?" Hrmm, this is hard to explain what I mean because as the grains go up the grist changes.... I guess what it comes down to: given a fixed OG would a wort from a lower efficiency mash with more grains provide this "difference" over a wort with a higher efficiency mash with less grains.

Another way to look at it 2XC would be that "reducing the volume of liquor exposed directly to the grain increases the maltiness/richness."

An extreme analogy of this can be found when brewing a 'long black' coffee on an espresso machine. The good barista will run the hot water through the coffee grist until the 'cream' starts to vanish and they start to see just black running through. At that point they take the cup away and top it up with hot water. The bad barista will not take the cup away. Instead, they allow the water to continue to run through the coffee grounds until the cup is full. The good barista's method extracts the "nice" stuff from the coffee until it runs out. The bad barista takes all the nice stuff and then continues into an area where only tannins and other nasty stuff are left to be extracted.

The two coffee methods above make a very different coffee. Thankfully, with beer, exposing the grain to all the water is nowhere near as critical. As I said in the original post here, most brewers would not be able to taste a difference between a, "no-sparge," beer and a normal BIAB or traditional beer.

Phew!
Pat

Good Day. Here is a no-sparge link....
http://www.picobrewery.com/askarchive/no-sparge.htm

It has a rule of thumb grist-water-S.g. table at the bottom.

Sorry guys, I have just deleted some posts here as they included links to threads that described BIAB as a, "no-sparge," method. Relating BIAB to the historical, "no-sparge" method is inaccurate and also leads to people believing BIAB would result in poor efficiencies. If BIAB was a, "no-sparge" method, this topic would actually be totally pointless.

It is important to realise that BIAB does involve a sparge (rinse) but the sparge is 'passive' or 'hidden.' With BIAB, all water comes into contact with the grain just as it does in traditional methods. With, "no-sparge" brewing there is no sparge at all (active or passive) as half the water never contacts the grain.

Once again, sorry to delete your posts/efforts but it is important to keep terminology correct. For this reason we like to use, as far as possible, historical or pure definitions such as used by brewing scientists.

Distorting or stretching definitions leads to a lot of problems so make sure you hand these definitions on when and where you can. Sometimes they take a while to get your head around especially if you have already read many of the distortions or stretches. In other situations, such as this one, the original terminology made perfect sense at the time of inception but with new methods (in this case, BIAB) it can certainly be a bit confusing. A few slow reads though usually results in a, "Now I get it!" moment.


Pat

This is an interesting topic, I can see the misconception. It seem that "No Sparge" has been around longer than Biab, and some people have taken to the notion that biab is no sparge.
Reading Pats post above I can clearly see a difference in methods, and now I know why peoples original thoughts on Biab were that it wouldn't be as efficient.
I think it definitely think this misconception needs to be rectified.
Spread the word people!

Too right wiz

I actually still remember the post where someone first mentioned "no-sparge" and "BIAB" in the same sentence. What a woeful day that was . This one post led to the efficiency misconception you mention. There are actually still very respected sites out there that carry on this myth. Many of these are not able to be edited or updated . I can't even bear to see what is written on some forums .

Anyway, seeing as I have two BIAB set-ups, I should give "No-Sparge" a crack one day though I suspect my palate won't be advanced enough to notice any difference .


PP

So given this definition would you say that the practice of combining all the grist and the full volume of liquor in a mash tun at the beginning of the mash and draining it all at once is basically identical to BIAB? I guess the MT is just your "bag" and the only difference would be that perhaps a flexible bag can squeeze out a bit more wort? The reason that I ask is that I've been brewing this way for a few batches and formulating my recipes with the spreadsheet from this site: http://home.roadrunner.com/~brewbeer/fi ... parge.html which derives the same scale up equations that are in Palmer’s book. The process that he calls "no sparge" doesn't quite fit the definition you give because he advocates mashing at normal thickness then adding the rest of the liquor volume to the MT right before recirculation and draining. So by your definition there is a "sparge" because all of the liquor comes in contact with the grain although it's different from BIAB in that it's not all there during the mash itself. I'm wondering if this difference in mash thickness makes his equations less applicable to my process which seems is actually closer to BIAB. I've only done 2 batches this way do I don't have enough data to comment yet, but it seems that perhaps I should be using BIAB calculations instead of the ones from that site. It would be interesting to see how they compare.

Good Day, A defination of "sparge" is to "rinse". Maybe we should Call BIAB -- Full volume,"NO RINSE" Brewing. We Can Define "full Volume" as the (final volume to the fermenter + (1 liter/Kg of grain) + (1 liter wort loss/trub)) Times (1.25 or 1.3 boil off %) and then say No Rinse/Squeeze the bag.
Sorry for the rant, But 3V people ALWAYS ask me... "Where is the sparge????" By and by I have e-mailed J. Palmer about BIAB twice, without a reply. Mr. Palmer is part of Blichmann Brewing company, so he pushes very nice 3 Vessel Equipment from Blichmann.
Again sorry for the rant.

For J.Palmer's defination please check...http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter17.html.
He has a great description for Lautering and Sparge.

AND if you can find a copy of "Brew Your Own" magazine November 2011 issue, Read though Dave Louw's article on No Sparge Brewing. It is for NO-BIAB people.

There is a discussion pertaining that recent BYO Magazine article about "no-sparge" brewing over at HBT. It sounds as though the article actually describes full volume brewing. I took the liberty of posting that there is a distinction between the two and referenced Pat's original post (with credit, of course). I really hate to see misinformation being perpetuated......

There is also absolutely no dead space in biab.

The three biggest factors which results in biabs efficiency which is better than no sparge is supposed to be are

1) low absorption
2) no dead loss
3) high l:g ratios

I've modeled the biab mash using a similar approach to ken here
viewtopic.php?f=74&t=1066

Good Day, ThanK you Stux, In America 3V is still the Standard, And BIAB is becoming a concept. People here have a hard time leaving what they know, and trying something new. I hope your work on BIABacus turns out fine, so the rest of the world has something to help understand BIAB.

So if the dead loss in my mash tun is very small, let’s call it negligible and I'm using the same l:g ratio as if I were doing BIAB then the only difference would be absorption? Is that supposed to be better because the bag squeeze out more wort? It seems that the two approaches are pretty close and perhaps your BIAB recipe formulation would be more accurate for me than ken's which assumes a "standard" mash thickness of around 1.5 q/lb that just gets topped up to full volume right before draining. The issue with his is that it assumes you’re starting with an accurate recipe that is fly spared and just scales up from there, and frequently people don’t post their lautering assumptions with their recipes… Thanks for your work on this Stux, I’m going to convert your spreadsheet to US units and put it to use on my next few batches and we’ll see where things come out. I’m even thinking that I could compress the grain after I drain it al a BIAB and then I would think my results would match your formulation pretty well.

Good Day MsCue, People around me have made a board, food grade (oiled or wrapped in plastic film) about the shape of the Cooler/mash tun, and placed it in the mash tun, then placed heavy items on the board, cement blocks, gallon bottles of water, or best, thier foot. This does get another 1.0-1.75 quarts of wort from the grain. Some have given up with "MASH in a BAG" and go BIAB.

Kai from braukaiser says standard methods have a real absorption of 1.56L per KG

From my research biab has a real absorption of about 1.2L or 1.4L depending on if you squeeze or not

IF you change the absorption figure to 1.56 then my ce biab calc will calculate a full volume no sparge with zero dead loss

After one brew you will then know your actual real absorption

Btw, change the ui sheet to us units not the details

I found a link to BYO magazine from 2002 from John Palmer about No Sparge where he describes the No Sparge mash as a normal thickness mash, where at the end you add all your sparge water, and then lauter.

http://www.byo.com/stories/techniques/a ... the-sparge

He regards that as a full-volume mash, where in fact, it is not.

Now, the benefits of this approach should be

1) same conversion factors as a traditional mash
2) no sparge richness and biab like efficiencies

but

you will require a second vessel/heat source to heat up the sparge water. and you will still require a mash vessel large enough for a full-volume biab, yet you will not see any higher efficiencies, and you would be able to boost efficiency significantly if you were to use the second vessel to perform a dunk sparge

The benefit of using the full-volume upfront is

1) simplicity
2) no extra vessels required
3) possibly enhanced conversion

The only con relative to palmer's no-sparge method is that there is some research, primarily in George Fix's "Principles of Brewing Science" that a thinner mash results in a drier/more fermentable beer. It also results in increased extract efficiency.

This can possibly be countered by adjusting the mash temperature away from 'norm' for a thick mash.

I looked into the thinner = drier thing a bit further





I'll note that the tables only cover 1.5, 2.56 and 3.45 L/KG mash thicknesses, and a lot of full volume BIAB would be much thinner mashes, around 5-7 L/KG

It is possible that things behave very differently at those extremes... but who knows

What I do know is the conversion efficiency is about 99.5% in my own tests, and the lautering efficiency and thus into kettle efficiency is perfectly predictable

Meanwhile, BrauKaiser quotes 2 papers and their own experiments, which show that the change from 2.57 to 5 L/KG makes no difference

"
The results for mash thickness were somewhat surprising. Contrary to common believe no attenuation difference was seen between a thick mash (2.57 l/kg or 1.21 qt/lb) and a thin mash (5 l/kg or 2.37 qt/lb). Home brewing literature suggests that thin mashes lead to more fermentable worts, but technical brewing literature suggests that the mash concentration doesn't have much effect in well modified malts [Narziss, 2005]. Briggs cites data that doesn't show a change in fermentability when the mash thickness is changed [Briggs, 2004]. This was confirmed by these eperiments where all the data points were on the same curve that had already been established in the temperature experiment.
"
http://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php?ti ... _thickness


Food for thought

I suspect that thermometer accuracy makes more of a difference

After I finish mashing and I am heating up to the boil, I put the bag on an old fridge shelf over a large bucket. I drain 75ish degree wort from the mash pot via the tap and basically rinse the grains with about 5 litres of wort which is then added back to the pot.

Will rinsing with hot wort rinse more sugar out of the grain or am I just wasting my time?

In theory, the first runnings that you are rinsing the grain with are at the same potential as the wort trapped in the grain, so should make no difference

You want to be diluting the wort trapped in the grain. The volume of wort trapped will remain the same but the gravity will go down.

That's the theory

Practice could be different

I disagree on several points.

You can call things whatever you want, but common sense says to rely on common definitions. At least here in the states, the word sparge means "to rinse with water" or "sprinkle with water". This is the most common definition historically and into the present. BIAB does NOT sprinkle or rinse. I don't even understand your reference to "hidden" or "passive" sparge. Common consensus is that sparging is the introduction of plain water to the grain - BIAB doesn't qualify. Bottom line: BIAB and No-Sparge (more on this in a minute) methods are "draining" methods, not "rinsing" (sparging) methods.

As far as "No-Sparge", I agree that the "historical" No-Sparge method is as you describe - mash as normal, drain, add top up water to the kettle to reach full volume. However, that's certainly not how most US brewers would define it today. No-sparge nowadays refers to filling the mash tun with the entire water volume - exactly like BIAB, and then draining the whole lot into the BK. So while you've *chosen* to associate the term "No-Sparge" with the historical method, many brewers today think of it as a full-volume draining method. Time moves on, definitions change. Gay used to mean happy.....

And I'll go on record saying I think it's poor judgment to censor the forums by deleting posts. I can see it for obvious spam, but not for valid arguments regarding methods and definitions of brewing terms.

*waits for post to be deleted"

Michael

Well, let's just hope that new all-grainers will understand the intention of this thread which is clearly stated in the first line of the first post.

Interestingly enough, since doing the edits here over a year ago, I believe we have only had to delete two posts since which were fairly x-rated jokes. Anyone who believes BIABrewer.info constantly edits or deletes posts is incorrect. (Mind you, I just edited a post then where someone had trouble displaying a link.)

That being said, please keep any more posts here on-topic and consider carefully the first line of the first post before you make a contribution. If your post fails to do this, then we'll certainly have no problems in deleting it and will advise here that we have done so.

Cheers,
Pat

I would agree that the term "batch-sparge" is confusing. I didn't realize that was a point to contention with this topic, however.

I better term would probably be "batch-lauter", as "lauter" is generally agreed to mean "separate wort from grain".

As you mention sig, the conflict is with the initial premise of this topic - BIAB is NOT a no-sparge method. I've seen no reasonable explanation that BIAB contains a sparge, other than the cryptic and meaningless "hidden or passive" sparge.



I wouldn't characterize that as a misunderstanding. I'd say that's a reasonable conclusion and completely correct. I'll be unambiguous as well - BIAB IS a no-sparge method. The only way it's not is if you change the definition of the word "sparge". We all seem to agree that the term "sparge" means to sprinkle. I think any knowledgeable brewer would also agree that it relates to the addition of water after mashing.




You're right, that's exactly how Pat defines no-sparge, that doesn't mean it's the common *or ONLY* definition however. Pat seems to completely ignore the fact that the "full-volume no sparge" method even exists.



I like "Full-volume mashing, but it doesn't change the fact that BIAB, (or whatever you want to call it) is a method of brewing that requires no-sparging. That's just the way it is. If someone doesn't like the fact that no-sparge is often associated (incorrectly in some cases) with low efficiency, it doesn't matter. I've lead many brewing seminars and BJCP exam preps and I list the no-sparge aspect of BIAB as a positive trait of the method, not a negative.

Michael

As I see it, no sparge is defined relative to batch sparge.

There is no batch sparge (or fly sparge)

Thus there are two types of no sparge brewing, full volume and not full volume

Standard BIAB is a Full Volume No Sparge mash with a bag as a lautering vessel

Recently, I believe full volume no sparge mashing has become relatively popular without the bag, but I believe this is a new development, and BIAB popularized Full Volume No Sparge brewing

I understand why there is talk of a passive sparge, as the sparge water is integrated into the mash, which is unusual. I believe the point that is trying to be made is that you can and should expect good efficiency from a Full Volume BIAB, and that would be 78-83% Efficiency Into Kettle vs a more regular 60-65% for a non full volume no sparge

Okay, I'll have one more crack at explaining this Michael even though I have said the below in various different ways. I am now seriously doubting my writing skills .

The reason this thread was started was because people would search on BIAB and read 'no-sparge' in the same thread. Then they would search on 'no-sparge' brewing and come across, the original 'no-sparge' method which was a recognised mashing process which has been bastardised in recent years for reasons I am very well aware of.

The original 'no-sparge' method has many benefits and you can even do it with BIAB. It produces a maltier beer etc but at the penalty of lower efficiency.

I don't believe the original 'no-sparge' method of brewing should be lost though just because it is a bit inconvenient a term now that we have BIAB. (In hindsight, I would have preferred to call BIAB, 'full-volume' brewing, or something more accurate/exciting, but at the time, I didn't see the ramifications.)

Just like the original intentions of BIAB were to be able to do a brew in a single vessel, the original intention of 'no-sparge' brewing was to brew a maltier beer. The two techniques however have nothing in common.

Explaining this has always been the entire point of this thread.

Another original intention of this thread was to make it a "BIABrewer" post to expressly make this point. Hopefully there's someone out there that can write it better than I have been able to. (You'll have to do the same amount of research I have done though to get a full appreciation of the problem.)

I honestly thought that most people would 'get' my point. Maybe we should start a poll and see how many people do and don't?


Pat

Good Day, While I only do Full Volume BIAB, I can and, sometimes do, "Teabag" the grains in another vessel(2V brewing) and add it to the boil if I need more boil time, and did not have enough volume in my 1V kettle. But, I never "SPARGE" Fly or Batch since the grains are in a bag.

_________________________________________________________
Single Vessel BIAB is all I need....Until we figure out the no vessel technique